Golden papayas and the end of the semester blues

This semester was about focusing on details that spoke in line (and against) each other, and in turn formed a huge web of ideas connected with thin strands of string. It was appreciating things for their very own unique and raw qualities, from Paul Robeson's dark and low voice, to Reverend Gary Davis, not so church appropriate Candy Man Blues. It was Thursdays nights spent exploring Appalachia and the Deep South --but more than that it was seeing our class search for how we each connected with the songs we sang in our own ways. Shout out to beanheads, cat scratches, and subliminal messages about breaking up with Russians.

Fantastically enough, the pieces I created in this class became first iterations of other works I made this semester. The piece above was was exhibited at my Art For Social Change Fall show, inspired my my cornbread and molasses piece from a couple of weeks ago. 

Below is the artist statement. 

Vignette of Papaya: The Consumer's Disconnect from Production 

Mixed media

With the great influx of city dwellers, we are slowly losing the vital connection of production to consumption –this loss ultimately resulting in the exploitation of workers, lavish consumption patterns, and an enormous waste of goods. The producers of our food remain largely invisible, unnoticed and unappreciated. We are often blissfully unaware of the sources of our food and what economic, political and social implications are entangled in the choices we make about our consumption.

Inspired by Ian Cook’s essay Follow the Thing: Papaya which presents a series of vignettes about people who are (un)knowingly connect to each other by the international trade of fresh papaya. 

Campfire song

I began this class wanting to create artworks that reflected the places we would study in the hopes that what I gleaned from the course would allow me to make work the illustrated my past summer abroad in Europe. 

Sitting around the camp fire each week 

listening to fantastical stories told by Tony 

about far away (yet very close!) lands 

with people who at first were just faces

and have now turned into friends 

whose art I've seen grow 

and evolve 

and blossom. 

The semester has been an inspiration. 

I am now, at the end of the semester, seeing that creating art about a place and time is not all about replicating the facts about that place. While this is important, weaving in a part of my artistic style and experiences into these stories makes for art that is more meaningful to me and allows me to have a deeper and more personal connection to a place that I have never visited. Making art is not about replication or copying, but rather, creating ideas that undulate in and out of what I feels and what actually exists. 

Greenland Whale Fishery

I was mesmerized by this song when I first listened to it --it drew me into a new and fantastical world that seemed so far away, yet extremely tangible in my imagination. The life of the sailors was fascinating and alluring to me in that it seemed that all the sailors made a definitive decision to get on a ship and catch this huge whale. When do we make definitive decisions like this anymore? The idea of catching this huge whale with a minuscule ship seems wholly improbable to me. But the idea of dedicating a lifetime to trying to attain this enormous (physically and metaphorically) goal is commendable.  

Honey bee

Muddy Waters' honey bee seems to drift in and out of his life, much like the buzz of a honey bee when it is flying around you. He sings about coming and going, travel, and movement, but it seems like in the end when his honey bee is through with buzzing around, she comes home. 

Cornbread & Molasses

Take This Hammer
Leadbelly
Work song
Raw edges
Railroads
Labor
Brick yards
Hammering
Rebellion 
Corn bread and molasses 

Cornbread and Molasses 

Clay and thread 

Louis shot by a water gun?

I was tired of making depressing art about murder ballads so I opted for a more cheerful approach to the project this week. Louis Collin is a song written by Mississippi John Hurt after a conversation he overheard about a man, Louis, who is murdered. I figured that if Hurt overheard the conversation, their must have been some discrepancies --in light of this thought, I included a half naked man with a water gun, and a lumberjack with deflective laser beam eyes. These images are all strung together on wire frame glasses so viewers can watch the action unfold before their eyes. 

Barbary Allen

This weeks piece is an homage to Gustave Klimt, and Austrian painted and one of my favorite artists. These characters come from some of his most prominent works, namely The Three Stages of Women and The Women Friends. I was interested in displacing these characters from their original environment and creating a new place for them on the wooden panel where they could have a new dialogue. I have been playing with the idea of presenting a narrative, or scenes from multiple points in time, on one surface. This is easily achieved with film or music, but chronology, in my opinion, is difficult on a two-dimensional surface. The collage style lends to this idea because if allow you to overlap parts and explore different subjects' relationships with one another. 

The story of Barbary Allen is illustrated in this circular motif. Towards the left side of the panel stands cruel and composed Barbary. In the middle is Young William Green, weeping over his rejection and eventual death. Laying on the bottom is Barbary again --this time in her death bed caring the burden of William Green's death from heartbreak. 

Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

Ralph Stanley's instrumental style is captivating. Each note is percussive and pointed --each its own entity, strung together by what seems like an obvious beat for a folk song. In his version of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, he uses this distinct and quite charming style of playing to suggests that death is not something that should be mourned, but rather a celebration of life. This notion pairs well with the song, which sings about a circle being broken when a loved one that has recently passed. 

What I got from the song is that we form a bunch of circles, circles of friends, friends that are into food, friends that listen to you cry, friends that you get wasted with.

It's not just people though --you create circles of ideas -- your connection to the world. 

Those connections, those circles of ideas, circles of friends are broken when a person passes 

--but these ideas and people will eventually meet you in heaven. 

A circle to me means movement and change. In life, a forward trajectory isn't linear but rather organic like a circle overlapping on top of itself. 

Sassy LeRoi Jones + Oh Mary Don't You Weep

LeRoi Jones is hilariously sassy. I found myself highlighting a bunch of lines from the text which may, or may not have, been particularly important.  Sassiness aside, Jones put blues and American folk songs into perspective for me. Work songs and spirituals were a source of inspiration and strength for African Americans during the slave era. There were no music scores for these songs like for Beethoven's 5th. Rather, African American folk songs was a malleable and organic product of the rough African assimilation into American culture. 

Many work songs disclosed specific clues about the paths slaves should take to escape to freedom. Mary Don't You Weep, however, does not offer such clues. Still, embedded within it is a coded message of resistance and liberation. This song has resonated with African American, both before and after their emancipation because the Israelites struggles, which are sang about in the song, paralleled their struggles. 

The Mississippi John Hurt version of Oh Mary Don't You Weep resonated with me the most because it was bare and true. I loved the twang on the guitar. He sings it with an air of hope and inspiration --a feeling that cannot be detected upon just reading the lyrics of the song. 

I was especially intrigued by the rawness of the song -- his tone evoking hope and yearning for freedom. 

What is Soul?

I had a fantastic idea for a project this week, HAD being the operative word. After listening to the Spiritual and Gospel songs on loop for a couple of hours, I was at a loss for ideas…

How do you portray something as heavy and culturally loaded in an artwork? What is soul?

I’m running back to the idea of warmth --but it’ more.

Light

Struggle

Vulnerability

Centeredness

Something ephemeral

Does this mean you have to struggle to have soul?

Something so raw it hurts

Soul is shrine

Soul is goose bumps

Soul is energy

I’ve been running in circles with these ideas. I don’t think it can be visually portrayed in one attempt –no good art ever is.

For this weeks project, I’m building on last week’s themes of light, shadow and negative space. Baby steps. I think I’ll work with text and a favorite quote from this week’s readings

Two arguments:

“You are black, which means you live too close to the sun. Black is evil.”

“ You are white…which means you live too far way from the sun. You have no color…no soul.”

Guiding words: land & home

Google Down in the Valley, and hundreds of versions of the same song will appear. Each version, however, is sung in a unique way and evokes a different kind of energy. The Andy Griffith Show version of Down in the Valley resonated with me as I could feel an overwhelming sense of security and warmed in the way the lines of the song were delivered. Perhaps this is what home should feel like -secure and warm. 

In this weeks project, I wanted to depict the security and warmth of my bedroom through photographs and sound. 

Below are two images I have been playing with. I'm interested to see how I can get these two images to obviously read security and warmth.  

Why folk songs and old songs?

Good music makes me shiver and undoubtedly gives me goose bumps. The power of music to evoke emotion is captivating -music alone can cause a person to laugh hysterically or fall on their knees sobbing. I'm excited to create work for this class that will capture the pulse and energy on the folk songs which we as a class experience together. 


In our first project, we were asked to depict, in some way, the first song that we remember. What "first" meant was up to our interpretation. A sad, but unfortunate fact is that I can hardly recall the first decade of my life. Small bits and pieces flush back to my memory occasionally when I smell a familiar scent, or visit a special place. The one song I can remember from my childhood is the first song I danced to in ballet class when I was five-years-old. It was a song sung in Mandarin. The name and artist are unknown to me, but the lyrics for some peculiar reason, have remained in my mental rolodex. Perhaps -this is the power of music. 

The song, a nursery fable, tells of a fox whom attempts to persuade a rabbit to let him in the rabbit's home. The rabbit, to our joy, refuses to let him in as the rabbit mother is not home. Pen on paper, 2013 Below is my visual interpretation of this song. 


The background pattern of this piece was inspired by a previous self-portrait print I created.