Influenced Identity = I
As citizens of the twenty first century we are constantly under the scrutiny of a double sided mirror. The media and technology of our age has made us constant voyeurs, and victims of the like. However, our cultural instinct clings to the idea of unique identity; a desire that is quickly fulfilled by various societal systems, causing our identities to be, in a sense, false. We become enactors of a pre-determined persona. Be this true for an individual, a nation, a culture, or even a race.
The eleven artists in Influenced Identity = I are all seeking to describe various aspects of these phenomena from how it affects us individually, to the investigation of who determines these “identities.”
Laylah Ali’s Untitled (types) describe the anonymity of outsider peoples. Her futuristic character descriptions make references to various African tribes’ people through their costumes. However, it is in Ali’s future that these people have no skin color, no particular name, just the marks of two words, “untitled” and “type.”
In Maria Jose Arjona’s video and installation piece, FAKE the artist, regularly known for her meditative and quiet performances, gives in to the influence of what is Miami’s often MTV like art scene, mocking the role of artist as hipster and model. She becomes a Gwen Stefani-esque character with her red lipstick as she struggles, not with intellectual themes, and the poeticisms of the piece, but rather with contorting herself into skin tight clothing, violently cutting and ripping at the leather like material (which we later learn is in fact, garbage bags) with uncontrollable desperation, making herself finally, and quite saleably... One Size Fits All.
In Pia Dehne’s drawings we are seduced by the screen, the mirage of femininity, of the illustrious sensuality not only of the figure but of the beauty of the drawing itself. The women in these drawings, surrounded by various mythological creatures, become what for centuries male artists have wanted the female figure to be, an object of beauty, illusive, mysterious, yet exposed for the gaze of the viewer.
“I am intrigued by the notion of subjecting a person’s head and face to various physical phenomena, in the aftermath of which various psychological stuff would leak out.” The idea that the photogenic self differs from the visceral self is something which Jenny Dubnau explores in her painting. After participating in an intense photo shoot with her subject (in this case herself), Dubnau extends the resulting photograph through painting, exploring the variation in identity from reality to photo-reality to a painted reality. Through the implemented drama of costumes, make-up, etc. Dubnau creates a final rendering which is truer, and more descriptive of the original and real self than the photograph, inviting the viewer deep into the psyche of the sitter.
Butterflied images of masculinity and Americana litter Jorge Espada Valenzuela’s work. The doubled images which are hand painted and thus not exact describe this Chilean, now American male’s idea of the self. An identity comprised of pop imagery experienced second hand through television, and magazine ads, a media frenzy of what an American male should be, a stallion, a gun, a Christ figure, all encased in a techni color rainbow, come together to form a metaphoric representation of the self.
Richard Höglund’s seemingly abstract drawings investigate the Eriksonian model of the formative stages of the life cycle. The work 2m20 : Multiplicité de relations d’indifférence begins with a drawing installation, located upstairs of the gallery’s main space in which the artist creates a VIII stage environment. Drawing VI is created on an individual sheet of paper which when complete is removed from the previous eight stages, re-framed and placed downstairs amongst a new environment, symbolizing the first stage of adulthood in which the individual begins to encounter new environments. Dealing with the formative stages of life, and how an identity is formed through experience, growth, and age this piece deals with a more organic model of development, and the influences that shape a persona.
In My Silhouette, we see a beautiful yet amorphic shape created by a delicate, almost translucent material. Upon closer inspection we learn that the piece is in fact made from toilet tissue. The banal material is heightened through form and thus becomes an art piece, holy in its presence. In this piece Kaarina Kaikkonen is describing not only her identity, but the identity of the masses, by sculpting this non-descript shape out of an “every man” material such as toilet paper, she is describing the beauty of the un-identifiable mass, and connecting herself to it. She is seeking not to separate herself through culture, race, social standing, religion, or identification but rather to blend herself, her customs, and her aesthetic into a more global, unified identity.
In To Be Titled we see a mirage of urban imagery, a city skyline, a sky of blue, a de-railed subway car, a pink sky, or perhaps a bloody sky, all through a prism of what appears to be broken glass. Tom McGrath’s often nostalgic paintings deal with how our memories are altered via photography. In this piece we are invited to question how the identity of a city, of an urban landscape and the people in it can be skewed through imagery.
In the Surface Veil series Daniel Milewski invites the viewer to stare carefully at what seems to be an intricate network of non-descript lines, curves, and open spaces. Here through the absence of information we are being invited to question the network of systems which govern us. Are these geographical maps, are they socio-political diagrams, are they abstract forms? It is by erasing the symbols of order (architecture, color, text, ect.) that we can become aware of the systems that so heavily influence our identities, or lack there of.
In Destiny Pablo Tamayo creates a face out of thousands of miniscule shapes. From a distance, the shapes each appear to be identical, but upon closer inspection we see that each of these shapes is in fact unique. “So no matter how different we all are and the fact that we all choose different paths to follow, we are part of a whole, even if we are not aware of that fact.”
After a series of Branded images, Hank Willis Thomas has given us Unbranded. These images are part of a series of appropriated advertisements, one for every year from 1964 up until the present day, in which the artist erases any visible markings of brand, i.e. the McDonald’s label, the Altoids label, any catch slogans written for Ford, ect. By removing these cultural codes from the images Willis asks us to take a closer look at the message encrypted behind the text. Are these advertisements reflections of Afro-American culture, or do we find that this “culture” is in fact imitating the media?
Nina Johnson