Bachelor in Creative Practice Degree End Exhibition
The work I will exhibit for the end of year exhibition will be a selection from a body of work that takes the form of digital photographic imagery.
These images will discuss ideas around contemporary Diaspora, migrational identity and the disconnection that it can create. I would argue that this disconnection has manifested in youth as psychological ill health. This is what I want my imagery to explore.
From my evaluation of work to date I know that more work is needed in paring down and simplification. Allowing the work to speak for itself as well as planning out and scheduling my time more effectively
This body of work will be developed in BVAD 7.60 in the following ways:
By using photoshop to continue my use of distortion to figure- utilising form and investigation of color to convey themes of emotional distress
I will use contemporary models, choosing them for their connection, or lack of, within their whakapapa, rather than for standard ideals of beauty. Diaspora, Proselytisation and Semiotics
Diaspora:
“Artists who have migrated from one part of the world to another, (or whose families have), and who express their diverse experiences of culture and identity in the work they make; often expressing alternative narratives, and challenging the ideas and structures of the established art world.” Sonia Boyce TATE
Being a first generation kiwi (my mother having migrated to New Zealand from England in her late teens and my father’s family having arrived from Fiji a generation before) I can feel disjointed from this land and its people.
My work ultimately is ultimately always a gateway for my own processing of identity, however through investigation of this subject, I am realising how important it is to discuss this openly.
Kwame Anthony Appian’s book “The ethics of Identity” discussed the links between identity and culture. Appian pokes at cosmopolitan culture and its ever increasing rise in social decay. He questions how we acquire individual identity in void of mass identity (loss of culture) and how this then is manifested outwardly (suicide, bad health, addictive patterns etc)
Looking at current census statistics we can visually get a sense as to why this topic seems to be influencing contemporary art so heavily. With more and more of the population identifying themselves as multi-ethnic, people are yearning for connection and understanding of themselves.
Stuart Hall
Jamaican born English cultural theorist Stuart Hall was a significant intellectual giant who greatly impacted the work of artists and filmmakers of what became known as the British Black Arts Movement (Bam) of the 1980s and early 1990s.
Hall theorised that individuals have more than one identity. One that is based on similarities and a unity which comes from belonging to a shared culture (connection to others through genealogy); and one that is based on an active fluid process of identification. Responding and developing through key moments of difference and is therefore always evolving “through a continuous play of history, culture and power.” [Stuart Hall, 2017]
What Hall was talking about here was the constant pull to find balance within the ever conflicting and evolving understandings of self. For immigrants or children of, these conflictual emotions and cerebral efforts to quantify understanding around them, are exacerbated by the displacement from one's hereditary culture and also by the societal rejections of present attitudes.. Integral components for self identity. Hall goes on to further discuss how political and media commentary not only contribute to the establishment of self but also manipulate that transubstantiation.
In a world where more and more people identify as multicultural, what impact does that disconnection to particular parts of self and controlled subliminal rhetoric then create?
This understanding gives artists key insights into tackling and understanding this subject and the possibility of using it to inform imagery.
Semiotics
“Communication can be a form of mind control; the one that has the power to speak higher…””..the right speech can have a power over others in a certain way by making the individual point stand above all. The same happens with artworks with a conceptual meaning that stand and activate other people’s minds.” Writer Unknown, Tate
Semiotics are the study of sign and symbols and use of them in order to subliminally inject deeper messaging.
I become fascinated with their implications when studying their use throughout religious iconography and media and started using them within my photography and other pieces. Placing models in particularly and deliberately chosen positions. Making reference to things such as religious deity or influential people. The purpose of this being to feed to the viewer the narrative I am trying to tell without them realising. Implanting seed of thought.
Contemporary artists such as Shepard Fairey do this exceptionally well. Fairey’s use of the word OBEY as anti-messaging against advertising and subliminal directing. The art of semiotics being the ability to directly implant a thought through imagery.
Wangechi Mutu, a Kenyan artist based in New York, uses collage and layered photographs to achieve rich images centered around topics of proselytisation and the attitudes towards diaspora within the black community of America. She merges tribal identity markers with feminised over tonnes. She speaks to the subjugation of black women and exploitation of their sex.
The sources for her images are deliberately and pointedly chosen. Illustrated medical texts, fashion editorials, ethnographic periodicals like National Geographic, and pornography. Each image in some way dealing with control, assigned passive functions and roles, as anatomical specimens, models, native types, sex objects, and so on.
Surrealism
Surrealism, the art of depicting dream like states of inner worlds of the mind. For artists such as André Breton, who published The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.”
I would be amiss here if I wasn’t honest about the impact that this movement has had on my work. Artists such as Breton, Magritte, Dali, Watts, Bosch, have all steadily leached their imprints into every mark I make.
Discussing poignant issues around identity and self, through the use of deeply bedded symbolism, surrealism casts deliciously designed and crafted imagery. Invoking a searching for meaning in both the work and its emotional response from the viewer. It drives us to search the depths of our psyche and that of the collective hive mind. Inspired largely by the works of Freud, Surrealism calls into question the rationality of the irrational.
I play with this through the manipulation of figure and form. Edging the viewer to see and experience something not quite based in reality. I push to convey the inner psychological questioning that one experiences with feeling around diaspora and their identity.
