Discover Thesis 2022
Southeast Museum of Photography
Yeah. I mean, for a while I did the same thing. You know, I'd look for stuff that was expensive. Just because it was expensive. And I was like, why am I doing this and spending money on something that in my head, people are going, wow, this guy looks cool, but no one's doing that. You know, and, like, it's just it's only in my head, so I might as well get a watch. That's fake gold that I like. You know, it's only going to have value to me, so I might as well save money.
My name is Houston White, and I'm from Orlando, Florida. Yeah, I was always interested in art. I got into photography in high school, and I always like different artists and going to museums and things like that. I only got into doing the art side of it rather than the photography side in college.
So I did a series called Fool's Gold, and it was about the idea that the materialistic things in life are fool's gold and the counterpart to that, to being real gold would be family, friends, connection, and anything else like that. But I didn't want to tell people that everything that you buy is fool's gold either because there is personal value in it.
So it's really the question of what kind of value do you put in fool's gold? You know, you can buy a watch or something like that. And if you're buying it for a reason of of gaining power or status with your fellow friends or peers, then it's, it's really you're putting a fake value into it. But if you buy that watch because it's something personal to you, then it has a personal value to it. It's just a question of questioning yourself and deciding with yourself whether you want to buy something, whether it's society commercials or if it's because of your own personal value in it.
So at the beginning, I started doing a series about power, and I wanted to explore the different areas of power and how power is affected and how we seek to gain power in different areas of our life. And I found that it was too vague. And there's so many categories of where we seek out power. And I had to focus it down to like one type of dark, because power can go into so many different things of manipulation.
So I decided to use products and power of products. And so then I actually discovered an artist that was doing something similar and creating large hundred dollar bills, sometimes made a gold, sometimes for bronze. And he was analyzing money and saying it was a tool and I found that very interesting and I decided to come up with my series and call it Fool's Gold.
This is the idea that money doesn't have the value in it, but yet it's a tool that you can use in life. First photo on my series is the headphones, and I did that for the connection of music as well. So this this expands to a wide range of not just buying products, but also indulging in things.
So music is something that I think a lot of people will listen to a certain type of music or a certain band or singer or something purely based off of their friends and what's on media and what's popular right now. Instead of exploring for themselves and finding something that's that's personal to them and connects to them, trying to connect this to things of music as well as Beats Headphones, which is a very popular product.
And I think a lot of people who listen to especially rap will say that Dr Dre Beats headphones is something you have to have instead of just looking out and finding what they want for themselves because there's plenty of headphones out there that can be better or just be more interesting to a person rather than just following the flow.
I think my personal favorite from my series would have to be the American Girl doll. I struggled a bit with kids products and I found certain things like, there was like this Lego head that was on a mantle and it was only meant to be on the mantle. And I found that very interesting because a kid when buying a toy, usually wants to play with a toy and a toy that's designed just to sit on a shelf and show off at a young age, it’s very interesting to me.
I think American Girl Dolls are a very special kind of toy to girls in a way of that. It's not a typical doll, you could buy any kind of doll, but if you have American Girl doll, it's something to talk about and something to show off.
I honestly tried to get a G wagon because G wagons are very interesting to me that they're an off road vehicle, but everyone doesn't use them as an off road vehicle. Everyone uses them as like a status thing of, look, ‘I have a G wagon’, but I decided to go with the Corvette, mainly because I couldn't get a G wagon and the Corvette was still something that was iconic and shape final one, which is the Warhols tomato, canned soups and that was talking about art commodity. And I wanted a way to talk about my art being in a museum of how it's also part of this idea of something that I'm not having in a museum to to show off and to go, Ooh, you know, I'm in a museum, but also to, to just for it to be art, it's something that's personal to me.
It's valuable to me. But it also talks about not only my own art in the museum, but it talks about the art commodity as in buying art anything in the art world that people buy them in order to save money on taxes and or to do different things, or they just buy an art because it's popular and they throw it in their house and they go, Look what I have.
And they don't know the true meaning or value or have no personal meaning to the art at all. And they're just buying it for popular status. So I think the art commodity is a very flawed area of people buying things because they're told to buy them and not buying them because that art speaks to them personally.
There's a couple of interesting things about the postproduction. I took these some of them with my camera, some of them with my phone in a store because, you know, I would take a lot to buy products and return them. But I found something that was very interesting while I was editing and the process to turn things into gold.
There's many different types of ways you could do it, and as many people teach in different ways to do it. And I found that when I did it my own way of my own process of turning it into gold, I found that there was these little fragments that kind of fall apart when as you get closer and it starts to look a little more grainy and things start to blend into each other.
And I think that really added to the topic because if you're standing back from it, you're going to see a gold dollar or a gold car, but as soon as you get closer up to it, you realize it's a post process thing and the gold has been put on top of it and it's not actually gold. So I think that caused fool's gold as well as seeing something from afar and going, Oh, that's gold, and getting up close and realizing that it doesn't have any value besides value that you put into it.
So my favorite part about the series was that I added little pieces of pyrite and a little bowl that says, Please take one. And this turned it into an interactive piece in the way that people can come up and they can take one and they can decide whether or not they're going to keep it. And it's a very interesting thing because it's what we're basically doing every time we buy a product that we're asking ourselves, what's the value of this product to ourselves?
And I had a lot of people come up to me and tell me like their reactions to it and I had two that were very interesting, one who was a classmate of mine and went through a whole semester with me. So my art was very important to her and she thought was very interesting so she took the pyrite, right?
She said that she's going to treasure it forever. She's going to put it on a shelf, and it would remind her of, the semester or me or the art or anything else. That's also a good way because she's taking the Fool's Gold and she's putting the value into it. Another one was a professor of mine who decided he said he took the gold and he looked at it and then he put it back.
And I thought that was interesting because he thought to himself that I'm not going to do anything with this. I'm just probably going to put in my pocket, forget about it. Maybe I'll throw it away. Maybe I'll give it to someone else or something like that. So he felt that he had no value that he could put into this Fool's Gold, so he decided to put it back.
Both are the correct reaction. It's about what the meaning is to you. It's not about that everybody else has taken a piece or that it's just there. You have to take one or there's a sign saying, please take one, so I should. It's about what it means to you and whether or not this little piece of pyrite has any value.