Artist Statement
I create art because I trust that it can encourage participation and interventions on a personal and mass scale in society and politics; from the most complex of events to the simplest. Through constant questioning of the information we receive from the media on daily events we can better understand how and why they happen, even predict when they will occur in our future as history often repeats. It’s through art that I am able to make sense of world issues and with my pieces I try to create new contexts for readers and viewers of the stories we are bombarded with, or indirectly told not to pay attention to. The body of work that I have most recently been working on uses photo references from mainstream news media assembled in a manner that challenges media fictions and perceived realities. By analyzing the images that the editors carefully select from multiple news sources I can establish my own narrative of a particular story or event and encourage the viewer to re-evaluate their perspective politically of a subject via a bricolage of news imagery.
‘We are used to telling ourselves that the arts need the protection of a flourishing democracy in order to survive. But in fact, the opposite is at least equally true: democracies require art – challenging art – to ensure that they are acting as free societies.’ (Caroline Levine, Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts)
With modern media institutions being in the hands of only a few major conglomerates the daily information we receive reflects a particular news corporations political ties and ideologies. This in effect establishes the antithesis of a democracy; it has become increasingly difficult to access information that does not contain numerous reasons why we should have faith in our leader’s policy and decision making or askew with underlying motives of constant consumption without consequences, anything to keep the market growing. The media’s original role in society was to accurately inform citizens of the society in which they live, locally and globally and encourage self-participation in democracy. Today, they seek to conquer and influence every aspect of our lives except promoting active political participation. For them, a properly functioning democracy is the kind where people are spectators to the political process and nothing more. We get told to vote between two people once every four years and then to sit back as the elected implement new economic and foreign policies with disastrous consequences such as privatization of public services, astronomical inflation rates, corruption and wars both at home and abroad. The media encourage us only to voice our opinions in the “free market” because they believe it is a more effective system of displaying public sentiment than voting can ever be. It is essential to their ideology that the public must be distracted from anything of significance because we the masses are incapable of knowing what is good for our society. It is their job to persuade us into a future we cannot see for ourselves and it is this mentality I believe must be opposed and intervened on by all levels of society. We need to take responsibility of our own behavior because everyone has the ability to change their thinking and perceptions through self questioning and that is what can ultimately reform the structures that keep us from progressing into a legitimate form of democracy.
The late Paulo Freire, a Brazilian professor, philosopher, activist and education reformer who spent his lifetime exploring ethics and democracy believed that an individual does posses the capability of creating an effect on tomorrow’s history for the reason that we are all:
‘…equally subject and object in the historical process. In the context of history, culture, and politics, I register events not so as to adapt myself to them but so as to change them, in the physical world itself…So, by our capacity to register facts and occurrences, we become capable of intervention.’
(Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage)