‘Protect me from what I want.’ A beautiful conceptual piece by Jenny Holzer. A piece I came to because of a song of the same title by one of my favourite artist’s; Placebo. A reason I chose this piece of art to appropriate is because I’m using it in my manifesto project currently, but also because the art, the words, they’ve followed me throughout my teenage years and mean a lot to my identity.

The words ‘protect me from what I want’ have always made me think of certain things I want that I know are not good for me, that I shouldn’t delve in to. Corrupt fantasies we all have, temptations we tease but know will end up being our downfall and then even our epitaph.

Which was my mindset whilst creating my appropriated piece, a piece that incorporates how I feel about this text in representation to myself. I layered images of myself in Photoshop to create an almost double exposure image of myself that comes across ghostly as if I’m not fully there, as if my mind is not fully there which is how I feel most of the time, thinking about things that I shouldn’t. I used the colour red as a powerful symbol of danger, as if you should stay away, I should stay away from these corrupting thoughts. The contrast of cyan was a happy mistake whilst messing around with layering effects but I thought it worked aesthetically and compositionally.

Overall, I think it’s a very interesting art piece that conceptually says a lot about myself.