Currently a student majoring in fine arts, she has been using instagram for four years to showcase her creations. She describes it a mini-gallery that enables her to access a larger public and create a sort of portfolio for herself.
As a student, she has not really focused on making a creative use of Instagram, but simply posted her creation in the regular square or rectangular format. However, she notes that one can easily play on the perspective from which pictures are taken, explore different points of view or types of framing. She also evokes how different pictures on her feed can be organized to create an harmonious, coherent feed, or even a specific structure that plays on horizontal, vertical or diagonal lines. Finally, showing the process of artistic creation on Instagram can in itself be very artistic and lead to redefine artistic codes as a whole : art on Instagram does not have to be ‘finished,’ it can be a process…
As she does not feel that she has truly tried to push the boundaries of Instagram or to challenge its norms, her customization of this platform remains limited.
She declares that Instagram is difficult to customize, and that even if some artists have managed to push back its boundaries and limits, the artistic production that Instagram enables remains normalized. Looking beyond her own experience, she also mentions the idea of private property and declares that the platform can be dangerous because when posted, one’s art is no longer truly theirs. Moreover, censorship on Instagram can be very constraining : shutting down some accounts because of the depiction of a women’s breast or hair could be seen as hindering freedom of expression. However, she also declares that any artists somehow has to adapt to specific formats and requirements to showcase their art, whether it is on the web (on Instagram for example), or in real life -- in a printed publication, in a gallery or in the context of an exhibition…
She likes instagram because it enables each artist to create their own ‘bubble,’ their own thematic and harmonious space on the web. This, according to her, cannot be possible on other platforms such as Pinterest, which does showcase art but seems to be less organized to her. She also mentions Tumblr, but says that it went out of fashion and is no longer a very good place for artists to acquire recognition and visibility.