Contemporary Drawing Practices: Narrative

Showing posts with label Narrative. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Monday, August 17, 2015

Tracey Williams, Artist

A Short History of Some Other Things, 2006

“It’s about storytelling and trying to engage people. It’s a narrative that defies closure – it opens up questions – ie it doesn’t tell you what to think,” she says.
“You are put in a place where you have a different relation to things that you may already know [Disney characters, cowboys, pukeko]. When things are really familiar you never question them. Images that you have grown up with background your psyche.”
Williams says her work is an antidote to the “grand narratives” people define themselves by. She is interested in the way people pick and choose from their life experience to define themselves.
It’s part of the adopt-a-culture trend in modern life, she says.
“People look outside themselves to find meaning. It’s a collaging of images. US culture seems to have taken its contemporary rules off TV and we are kind of doing that here. I find that really sad. People are desperate to find an identity but they don’t stand still long enough.
“We have become such a commodified culture. I buy that car, I am that car. I buy those clothes, I am those clothes. There’s a sad lack of ethics underneath it.”
In identifying ourselves or our race as possessing certain traits, we risk overlooking shared humanity, she says.

Image and text source from ARTZONE.

Andrea Dezso, Artist

Artist Website link here.

Lindsay Boardman, Artist

Kara Walker, Artist

Gone: An Historical Romance of Civil War as it Occurred Between
the Dusky Thighs of a Young Negress and Her Heart

Kara Walker was born in 1969 in Stockton, California, and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. She received a BFA in painting and printmaking from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and an MFA in painting and printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. Beginning with Gone: An Historical Romance of Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of a Young Negress and Her Heart (1994), she became known for her panoramic friezes of cut-paper silhouettes, usually black figures against a white wall, which address the history of American slavery and racism through violent and unsettling imagery. Gone includes a tree bough that suggests a typical novelistic setting for a lovers’ meeting, yet all manner of surreal activity takes place: the woman of a white couple that is about to kiss has four legs; the man seems to touch the bottom of a nearby black boy with his sword; this boy is holding a swan that has emerged from a black woman, who floats on the water (a set of metaphors for miscegenation).

Above text from Guggenheim.org

Watch on YouTube. Kara Walker talks about her work.

Link here.

More work by Kara Walker below.