Akoka'tssini: "She's Miss United States"

Monday, May 11, 2009

"She's Miss United States"

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGE VIEW)

Medium(s): Pastels
April 28th, 2009

- - -
USD Drawing II Final Portfolio composition done in about 2 hours time in an assortment of colored pastels. I've been making an artistic topic "move" to gas masks, and all that they can really symbolize and mean, especially in our time.
The gas mask to me personally represents things from a loss of individuality and identity (culturally, socially, and mentally). It can represent, with the loss of mental and cultural individuality and identity, we begin seeking, naturally, the pleasing and acceptance of others. Emmulating what other people want, when we ourselves are unsure of what he want or feel is right, has become almost a base and foundation for social development for people of all ages in this modern world. I relate some art to it because of how much I see it in my everyday life the second someone shows a certain appareance or usually opens their mouth, and how much I'm discusted with it.
I entitled it "She's Miss United States" relating to the event in which the "ideal" women of all over are to compete basically who has the best smile, the best breasts, the best body in a bathing suit, and the most fake mentality a person could have. How many girls are modeling themselves to these people as idols, and the "this is what I have to be in order to be seen as attractive".

The teardrop coming from the gasmask eye symbolizes how behind the curtains and show people put on for us, the more lost they are, the more inside they are dying for a place to feel accepted, regardless of how much it hurts them personally. They hide their true feelings and pain behind their fake identities.
The grusome belly button piercing sort fo symbolizes the body modifications we put our sacred bodies through to "achieve beauty" and attraction, from plastic surgery and breast inplants to pierced penis's and clitoris's. The things people do to themselves because they feel they just can or feel they will be more attractive in someones or society's eyes.
The blood and semen stains between her legs can represent a lot of things, kind of open for interpretation once the viewer understands a basic grasp of the meaning, but I'll explain some things I had in mind. The obvious semen and blood can represent anything between rape to selling their bodies. From prostitution to simply having sex for just pleasure, women have really lost the sacredness and meaning to what makes them special compared to men, and how sacred their wombs really are. How women throw themselves around and at any guy who will have them, or have been talking to him for 2 weeks, or met them at a party drunk, I couldn't be more discusted with when it comes to women in this society and the mentality we seem to have to feel wanted and accepted. Everyone seems to be out on their own and a "every man (or woman) for themself" world, where competition is waiting for us outside our doors in countless ways. Are you going to sell yourself to simply fit in a society in a point in time of the earths history?

--Artist's Critique--
This was one of the first pastel pieces I had taken seriously, and used what i had been learning relating to color and its visual effects relating to chroma and value. Discovering techniques of the pastel itself, color blending, and temperature. With pastel, especially in my Drawing II and Design II classes, I've been learning there are more colors than just an objects local color. Something that may appear black off the bat, may just be, in reality, a mixture of purples, blues, and dark reds. The green of the grass could be a mixture of orange, yellow, some green, purple, etc. I've been trying to use these in my own drawings to create more visually interesting compositions relating to the visual effects of color and color blending and mark making.
Compositionally, I enjoy that her body is not fully shown, some disappears and gives the body a very left-sided radical light source.
Things I would change would be the chroma intensity of her skin. Her skin, for this topic anyway, is too bright, pure, and healthy looking. Also her torso/stomach area to me feels too empty. Something I feel needs to visually be there and not just a plain body.

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The Artist

MY THESIS - "By any measure, we live in an extraordinary and extreme time. Language can no longer describe the world in which we live like it used to. With antique ideas and old formulas, we continue to describe a world that is no longer present. In this loss of language, the word gives away to the image as the 'language' of exchange, in which critical thought disappears to a diabolic regime of conformity - they hyper-real, the omnipresent image. Language, real place gives way to numerical code, real to virtual; metaphor to metamorphosis; body to disembodiment; natural to supernatural; many to one. Mystery disappears, replaced by the illusion of certainty in technological perfection. Technological acceleration does not affect out way of living - it is our new and comprehensive host of life, the environment of living itself. It is not the effect of technology on the environment, culture, economy, religions, etc., but rather that all these categories exist in technology. In this sense technology is new nature. The living environment, old nature, is replaced by a manufactured milieu, an engineered host-synthetic nature. In a real sense, we are off planet, swelling on the lunar surface of stone, cement, asphalt, glass, steel and plastics, engulfed in the atmosphere of radioactive oxygen and electromagnetic vibrations - the soothing aroma of atomic nuclear energy, the soothing lullabies of the machine. The common notion tells us that technology is neutral, that we can use it for good or bad. Though, in my opinion, we do not use technology, we live technology; technology is our way of life. Being sensitive entities, we always have and will become our environment - we become what we see (or may not see), what we hear, what we eat, what we smell, what we touch, etc. Where doubt and questioning is prohibited (indigenous or not), we become, without question, the environment we live in. With our Indigenous origins based in the natural order, should this context radically change, the mysterious nature of the human being shall also radically change - a change that will reflect the transformation of nature itself, whether it be a turning point or vanishing point. Natural diversity becomes a burnt offering, sacrificed to the infinite appetite of technological homogenization. We now live in the fiction of science. We are most definitely now, not in some made-up future, cyborgs. As we always have been, we are at one with our environment - we are technology. In this 'wonderland', freedom becomes the pursuit of our technological, industrial, and material happiness. Our standard of living is predictated on commodity consumption, as the practice our new spirituality is "pray for more". In vehicles of ecstasy, with cinematic engines of inertia at audiovisual speed, trans-port and tele-port blend into one. The beginning becomes the end. The 'port' disappears in the speed of light. The nanosecond, technological speed, transforms reality as it creates an ecstatic phenomena of compelling and unparalleled intensity. By human measure, charismatic technique portends the miraculous, as it engenders the condition of 'exit velocity' - a condition that blurs human perceptions, shatters all meanings, drains all content and breaks our bonds with the earth's natural order. All locations are consumed into the startling terra firma of the image, a demonic conformity that is the genesis of man. In this shadow of the mass, all previous definitions crumble. The 'time' and 'space' of history exist to a homogenized zone of no return. In this supernatural implosion of g-force, human moorings give way, sending humans out-of-orbit into the void of technological space. The loss of original habitat and our subsequent relocation into accelerated space, throws nature into catastrophe, as it engenders traumatic stress syndrome as the now normal condition of post-human existence. Technology, while promising comfort and happiness as its 'result', means power, means control, means conformity, means destiny. Technology creates a condition of war that is at once both universal and unseen. The explosive tempo of technology is war; the untellable violence of genocide, relocation and assimilation in technology is war. All of us, are refugees driven from our human and indigenous state."
- 22 year oldart student at the University of South Dakota. Majoring in Fine Arts (double emphasis in Printmaking and Painting), and a minor in American Indian Studies.
- My medium strength would have to be ink mediums such as inkwash, pen & ink, printmaking, lithography, etc. The finer and sharper the point the better. Though I have an increasing strength and interest in color usage with pastels and painting.
- My grandfather was an amazing artist, focusing mostly on landscape and WWII Veteran topics and is well known and highly regarded in the surrounding communities he impacted in central Massachusetts. He spent a lot of his time teaching me to draw what I see, and I've taken that to many different levels.

Oscar Howe Letter to Philbrook Art Center, after being rejected for not being "Indian Art", 1958

"Whoever said that my paintings are not in Traditional Indian style has poor knowledge of Indian art, indeed. There is much more to Indian art than pretty, stylized pictures. There is also power and strength and individualism [emotional and intellectual insight] in the old Indian paintings. Every bit in my paintings is a true studied fact of traditional paintings. Are we to be held back forever with one phase of Indian painting, with no right for individualism? Dictated to as the Indian always has been, put on reservations and treated like a child, and only the white man knows what is best for him. Now, even in art, you little child do what we think is best for you, nothing different. Well, I'm not going to stand for it. Indian art can compete with any art in the world, but not as a supressed art. I see so much of the management and treatment of my people, it makes me cry. My father died here about three years ago in a little shack, my two brothers still living there in shacks, never enough to eat, never enough clothing. This is one reason I have tried to keep the fine ways and culture of my forefathers alive, but one could easily become a social protest painter. I can only hope the Art world will not be one more contributor to holding us in chains."

Monday, May 11, 2009

"She's Miss United States"

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Oscar Howe Letter to Philbrook Art Center, after being rejected for not being "Indian Art", 1958