Studio Joyce Vlaming 

‘Fenster S’ is an abstract photographic series in which the artist explores the colour palette of consumer cleaning products such as shampoo and laundry detergent. The series focuses on the bodily sensations of the viewer when being exposed to ecstatic colours that call for your attention in supermarkets and other highly commercial environments.

 

Understanding the social and visual conditions of these environments is critical to the artist's practice. While studying the colour palette of consumer cleaning products, it occurred that most of these products are produced in soft or bright colours like pink and yellow; colours that, from the standpoint of marketing, are often used to attract women. There are also a few products especially designed for men. Yet, these dark blue, black or grey packages were predominantly made for personal care, and not for cleaning in general.

​

This gender driven colour approach in packaging and the emphasis on all-male personal care products exposed a traditional vision on product placement, which became a prior site of investigation for this series. The artist started to play with these colours to make a statement against gender profiling and cleaning being an all-female affair. The colours from all of these products were extracted by using counter productive photographic strategies such as no depth of field and no focus. This resulted in a mix of colours in which boundaries were blurred and new colour schemes emerged.