The Importance Of Images And Images In Claudia Rankine's Citizen

Pictures and images are interesting to look at for what they appear to be, but how they came to be is just as important. Some artists create their work through mediums. Mediums are the materials and techniques used to create pictures, and give it unique and creative characteristics. In Claudia Rankine’s book, Citizen, there are many images using mediums. Mel Chin is one of the artists whose work is incorporated into Rankine’s book through a simple, yet effective use of mediums.
Mel Chin is a conceptual artist whose images are motivated by political, cultural and social issues. The idea behind these pictures is that it is most important for an idea to emerge from the picture. Conceptual artists are not as concerned with how visually pleasing

A medium is the material and tools used to construct the images with ideas that relate to the world. This image was made of many other pictures from the Funk and Wagnall encyclopedia. These different pictures were all pieced together to form a collage. A collage is one picture that has many different parts added. The collage was formed by sticking various materials onto a single canvas that made them one picture. Putting pictures together separately just shows how different they are and how unconnected everything truly is. With a collage there is no structure, there is not harmony and it is all thrown together without much neatness or organization. Especially since the artists has a conceptual style, and is more concerned with the overall idea. The other medium used is the plain black and white image. Some people may overlook this, but it shows how society is black and white, there is no in between. Simple colors are a medium that have a large impact on the picture. Their impact is so large because the whole meaning of the picture stems from the most abundant medium used. The colors used are a black canvas with white figures pasted on. The black and white trend is seen throughout Chin’s paintings and is the way he expresses every collage. This can be attributed to the separation of black and white that is still prevalent in our world. This can also relate to today’s society