The visual signifiers in my personal work to this date have mainly been intentionally ambiguous. I have been predominantly focused on the in-between moments of everyday and the concept of devotion, however in practice my aim has been to relate to an audience through an aesthetic connection rather than a direct message. Reading this against the semiotic deconstruction of images used in advertisement it is clear to see that by an ambiguous approach is a potential way of alienating a percentage of my audience if there is no context of cultural signifier provided with the images. The issue here is that despite my thinking that there is an ambiguous nature to my practice, there are always indexical elements to my images that will appear as signs, even in a purely aesthetic sense. Whether it is in terms of the colour grading I add to the images or the objects/subjects in the images there is something that can be read into everything. The difference is that I am not intentionally asking my audience to read what I am telling but for them to make their own reading based on an emotional response.
I think that one of strategies I use to try and achieve a sense of ambiguousity is to try and remove any signs of time. Ideally the surroundings and locations for my images would be timeless, the only thing that might be a giveaway in a technical sense is when I have to use my studio, even still I am working on how to transform the studio into what I want it to be.
To a certain degree I feel that this strategy is a successful one however it is not always possible to control your surroundings. Another element of my work that removes it from a position of signifier is that I usually isolate the object or part of the subject, this is perhaps less successful in my practice currently as I rely on the outside world and anything can be recognizable. I find it interesting that in reality there is a connection between my intention to create ambiguity and advertisements looking to create a fantastical world. To cite Struken and Cartwright “Advertisments present an abrstract world, often a fantastic on, that is not situated in the present but in an imagined future”. The principal is the same but for different ends.
References
Sturken, A. & Cartwright, L. (2009) Practices of Looking Oxford: Oxford University Press
CRJ 