Tuesday, June 6th, 1:00-3:00, VA 105
VISUALIZING THE STEREOTYPE: Stereotypes are usually socially imagined ideas inscribed on the bodies of gendered, raced, dis-abled, and sexual-orientated subjects. This session examines the stereotypes associated with every one of these subjects, confronting the visual illusion that has been detrimental to their entire communities.
Michael Whitney, “Protagonist or Player: Who is The Real Subject of Games”
The realm of video games offers viewers a unique way of experiencing an artistic media unlike any other. Not only is the player meant to experience the stories contained within the game worlds, but they are to interact with the world where the main protagonist acts as their avatar. More often than not, the main character is a straight white male in his twenties, and as such, those that fall into other categories, such as females, African-Americans, and the LGBTQ community, are pushed off to the side. There are some exceptions; however, these representations run the risk of falling into harmful stereotypes rather than being a true representation of the kinds of people they are setting out to include.
Brianna Craig, “Bi/Erasure”
Bisexual history can be very complex, but art history is even harder to determine with the complexities of LGBT history. For instance, the French artist Romaine Brooks, working during the early-mid-twentieth century, has been identified as lesbian/gay, but she has represented herself as bisexual. This paper explores the different ways that bisexuality is envisioned in society including through stereotypes – female bisexual identity is often viewed as over-sexualized; at the same time considered as more masculine than heterosexual women and yet also required to be feminine.
Sylvia Quast, “Not Limitations, Just Inspiration”
As a society it is accepted that having a mental disability or illness is a sign of limitation - that it is a handicap to have a mental illness. However, studies have shown that art and mental health go hand and hand. The correlation between creativity and mental health recipients has long been studied but is still misunderstood. Vincent van Gogh was an artist with several illnesses and some of his greatest paintings, such as the Starry Night (1889), were done under psychiatric care at the Saint Paul asylum in Saint Remy Provence when he checked himself in for emotional suffering. It is imperative that people understand that artists are not simply limited because of the components of their mind, but instead they are pushed by the inspiration.
Rebecca Chrisler, “Let’s Talk: Stereotypes and Subjectification”
Kara Walker’s black cutout installation titled African’t (1996) is one of the most important works of Post-Modern Art and an instrument to open a nationwide discussion about the ramifications of slavery that have been quashed and ignored. Although Walker’s cutouts are about slavery’s persistent crushing of individual will, her main goal is to make the audience uncomfortable. In doing so, she makes the audience the subject, pressing upon them the severe and unjust stereotypes that society continually perpetuates. Walker puts into perspective the underlying and overt prejudices one has about African-Americans, not to place blame but to help dismantle these characterizations.
Candice Janssens, “The Vanishing Race: Dealing with Native Stereotypes Through a Lens”
One of the many fictitious and destructive stereotypes imposed upon Native Americans is the reference to a “vanished race.” An early 20th century, artist who reiterated this notion was portrait photographer Edward S. Curtis – his commission by the government to photograph and document North American Indians would include a depiction of the noble savage, a romanticized nostalgic effect of people from the past. However, Contemporary Diné photographer Will Wilson is attempting to erase the ethnocentric stigma through the same wet plate collodion process used in the early 1900’s. Wilson’s project entitled, “Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange” reveals how the stereotype of a “vanished race” is one that is unsubstantiated as well as dangerous to Native American people today.
Thursday, June 8th, 1:00-3:00, VA 105
VISUAL MODELS OF EXPOSURE AND RESISTANCE: Countering stereotypical thinking, this session explores updates and innovations by artists who provide unique perspectives and practices for a different visual vocabulary that changes the normative vantage point.
Amber Bowser, “Kara Walker an African-American Artist”
Kara Walker is an African American artist who specializes in silhouette cut outs that often depict slavery and the plantation life, and she is also a painter, printmaker, installation artist and filmmaker. Walker’s artist book titled Bureau of Refugees features her work from her 2007 series. Absolutely breathtaking as well as disheartening, the imagery and the words she used in her book shows explicit acts of racism including rape and other forms of torture against African Americans. I would like to show how an African American women like Kara Walker is able to express herself through her artwork – in the past this would have never been allowed because she’s a woman -- an African American woman.
Ranfis Franco, “Dissident Artist Ai Weiwei”
Ai Weiwei uses a great technique in his art to illustrate how the Chinese government is an oppressive regime. Ai often uses vintage furniture as the subject of his work and disturbs its functionality, disabling its ability to be used as furniture. Ai’s work expresses metaphorically for the restrictions on people in China and their freedom to function and serve their true purpose in life. This is also reflected in Ai Weiwei's Forever Bicycle (2015), a sculptural installation of bicycles that are missing their steering mechanism. Even these sculptural works are a form of dissident expression.
Jennifer Mayorga, “Artists, Christ, and Death”
In the Middle Ages, artists illustrated death in a fearsome way to scare the viewers to repent, and thus the Christian depiction of death in works of art has been analyzed primarily for religious symbolism and motifs. Most often the artist's own beliefs and thoughts about death as expressed in these paintings are often overlooked. This paper examines the subtle and overt ways in which artists such as William Hunt in the eighteenth century and Francis Bacon in the twentieth century connect their personal thoughts and feelings of death to the motifs of religious paintings.
Melissa Dailey, “SUR-FAKE: Identity Shaped by Technological Impacts”
With the mass accessibility and prevalence of internet-based media, it has become hard to distinguish the difference between reality and the created simulations behind the screen. Using Antoine Geiger’s photographs from his series SUR-FAKE (2015), this essay explores the impacts of internet-based media on the formation of identity. Geiger’s photographs are portraits, but no longer of a distinct face describing a specific individual. Instead, the subjects’ faces are depicted as being sucked into the mobile screens that they are interacting with. The stretched faces, both organic and digital in form, represent how integrated these technologies have become in our experience of ourselves and the world around us.
Shayne Mitchell, “Intuition”
In this logically-driven world we live in today, society follows a dominant way of thinking that revolves around rational thought. With the rational side of the brain dominating our decisions, we shut out the functions of the right side of the brain that keep us connected with our surroundings through our senses and intuition. This disconnection is revealed by artists such as Jason deCaires Taylor whose underwater sculpture The Lost Correspondent (2012) provides an example of right side attributes which are nonlinear, simultaneous, meaningful, and holistic; and thus, polar opposite of the rational mind.
QUESTIONS? Contact Professor Jane Chin Davidson – jchindavidson@csusb.edu
