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Quick and Dirty
The 'Quick and Dirty' exhibition was an early inward facing pop-up show at WCA, initiated and curated by Helen Dear and Constanza Marques Guedes. For someone like myself who had very limited experience actually participating in group contemporary art shows prior to the MFA, it was an incredibly helpful experience in how it demonstrated the potential for dialogues between diverse work in a space. Not only does the work change the space, and the space change the work, but the dynamics created between the work has a lot to be said for the success of any curation.
I ended up helping out with the installation of the show, which was the beginning of what has since been an interesting learning curve in the installing of various kinds of work in various environments.
Outside of paying more attention to curation, and beginning to take an interest in installation, 'Quick and Dirty' shone a light on the importance of collaboration, compromise, and the management of personalities for group shows. As emerging artists exhibition space - even within our own university - can be at a premium, and I believe that being able to negotiate the given space in creative and collaborative ways goes a long way.
Quick and Dirty
The 'Quick and Dirty' exhibition was an early inward facing pop-up show at WCA, initiated and curated by Helen Dear and Constanza Marques Guedes. For someone like myself who had very limited experience actually participating in group contemporary art shows prior to the MFA, it was an incredibly helpful experience in how it demonstrated the potential for dialogues between diverse work in a space. Not only does the work change the space, and the space change the work, but the dynamics created between the work has a lot to be said for the success of any curation.
I ended up helping out with the installation of the show, which was the beginning of what has since been an interesting learning curve in the installing of various kinds of work in various environments.
Outside of paying more attention to curation, and beginning to take an interest in installation, 'Quick and Dirty' shone a light on the importance of collaboration, compromise, and the management of personalities for group shows. As emerging artists exhibition space - even within our own university - can be at a premium, and I believe that being able to negotiate the given space in creative and collaborative ways goes a long way.
Arc
Arc
Arc
Coming into the MFA program I found myself very conflicted, and frankly frustrated, as to the direction I was taking with my work. My practice felt divided between a deep-seated - though largely unexplored - attachment to the process itself of drawing, and the socio-politically active side of my life that had yet to find much expression in my work.
In an attempt to resolve this divide I worked on a Hypermasculinity Series. In these works the aim was to communicate the point at which some men reach what seems like an apex in performed, clichéd masculinity that ends up becoming either 'toxic' or violently self-destructive. The glitch effect used in many of these drawings was included with the metaphor of 'heat death' in mind, whereby something evolves to a state of no thermodynamic free energy and can no longer sustain processes that increase entropy. While these works at the very least helped me to begin to re-think my practice, the results felt very limited in a consideration of the process of their making and in the feeling that the attachment to illustration was preceding the concept.
Following on from the first attempts, I began to reflect more on the process and labor of these concentrated drawing studies. Through tutorials I was given a vocabulary to verbalize and therefore focus on the notion of value in relation to labor of different kinds, and the value of the chosen subjects themselves. In many cases I gravitated towards conventionally 'low value' subjects, and treated them with an attention to detail and concentration normally reserved for more 'high value' subjects. Further, this was generally done with exclusively carbon-based, 'primitive' mediums.
Coupled with a growing fascination with Hito Steyerl's The Wretched of the Screen (more information to this point can be found in the 'Context' section), the next two works tried to logically follow on from the previous conversation about masculinity while also bringing the notion of value to the forefront. One, a charcoal rendering of an image of young Mike Tyson screenshot from a poor quality YouTube video, tried to incorporate a reading of Hito Steyerl's thoughts on the hierarchy of image quality in the digital world. The piece was done at a much larger scale (60 x 48 in) which satisfied a personal need for physicality in the process of drawing - a need which has since found some clarity in researching Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint series. Simultaneously I was building a few rudimentary tattoo machines, using only elements that might be available to incarcerated prisoners, as an object-driven expression of economies of value. Further, these two pieces were an important step in opening myself up to an ethos of the 'concept driving the medium' as opposed to the reverse, something I have been guilty of for much of my artistic career.
'November', Hito Steyerl, 2004.
Screenshot from Rottweiler, 2019.
In Defense of the Poor Image - Hito Steyerl, 2009
The Wretched of the Screen has remained a seminal piece of literature for my practice. While many of the essays in the publication have been of great influence, In Defense of the Poor Image has been of particular relevance to my most recent works: the 'Consensual Crimes' series, 'This Is Fine', 'Rottweiler', and 'Lockdown Diary'.
In this text, Steyerl calls attention to “the subversive quality of poor images and the networks that sustain them" (Hito Steyerl, in 'Art Review'. Paul Pieroni. 2014). She explains how the ‘poor image' challenges fixed interpretations, resists constructs such as borders and private property, attests to appropriation and transcends the categorical binary of consumer and producer. It also functions to strip the signifier from the sign thereby opening up semiotic production to those who have not historically been the gatekeepers of knowledge or content production. The ‘poor image’ has the potential to draft the user into some strange version of direct democracy; through "visual bonds" the workers of the world are linked to each other in a way that private ownership could not.
In Defense of the Poor Image speaks to the current post-truth climate that the West currently finds itself in. When entire narratives are constructed from soundbites, screenshots, and clickbait, the loss of context behind those pieces of information leave gaping holes in knowledge thus changing entire experiences of reality. Something which is displayed glaringly in Lockdown Diary.
In some ways, Steyerl buildings on the same questions Steve McQueen raises in his piece Illuminer; neither fiction nor fact can claim authenticity anymore. In the realm of the transmitted image, both fact and fiction are 'visual representations of given ideological frameworks' that construct their realities according to desires and drives. This instability of realities, and the attendant disconnect audiences experience from the original context or 'truth' (for lack of a better word) of the circulated image, is implied in my recent work.
According to Steyerl's belief in ‘visual bonds’, which are created by the ‘lumpen proletarian’ image, these realities are constructed by those outside of traditional knowledge production - despite having to compete with commercial and national propaganda. The poor image is "as much about defiance and appropriation as it is about conformism and exploitation". 'Imperfect Cinema'* is used as an example of this mechanism and was influential in the preparation and filming of Rottweiler. It is for these reasons that Rottweiler's file size was compressed in post-production - to allow for an (if only symbolic) ease of transmission, accessibility, and reproduction as exampled on this page.
*"The imperfect cinema is one that strives to overcome divisions of labor within class society. It merges art with life and science, blurring the distinction between consumer and producer, audience and author. It insists upon its own imperfection, is popular but not consumerist, committed without becoming bureaucratic" (Hito Steyerl in reference to Juan Garcia Espinosa, in In Defense of the Poor Image)
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