Post 4-Zoha Khan

Yayoi Kusama is an artist from Japan who moved to New York in 1957. Kusama is known for her daring artwork. At the time, she experimented with her artwork for example she had happenings in New York where she painted naked people with polka dots.

   “Dots Obessesion”, Yayoi Kusama

Her major repeated theme was that she almost always included polka dots. Kusama associated polka dots with the sun and the moon due to them having the same shape. The moon is thought of ascalm and soft. On the other hand, the sun is seen as the source of light and life. All the dots come together to show infinity in her art work. She considered the polka dots a big movement and was known for her abstract expressionism. 

                                               “Infinity Mirrored Room”, Yayoi Kusama

While the polka dots are am example of infinity, Kusama also used mirrors in order to show the concept of infinity. It forces the viewer to see themselves in the vast world, where they stand, and how significant they are in the face of the infinite magnitude. This infinity room resembles space, the stars, and the planets. The viewer feels the illusion of standing in the middle of a vast infinite space. Her art work comes from her experiences of mental illness where she would often hallucinate. She got inspired by those hallucinations and created her illusion where viewers are left to make sense of what they see.

                Kiki Smith is a German-born artist. Her art portrays various themes regarding the human body. She lost her sister to AIDS, and many of her subjects are part of the exploration of the human body. It also consists of body fluids which leads to women’s rights when it comes to their menstrual cycle. 

                                                           “My Blue Lake”, Kiki Smith

                 Kiki Smith is known for using her own face in her works. She wanted to portray herself flat and not as a 3 dimensional image. She went to London and was able to get access to a peripheral camera which was used for geological photography. She spent a whole two days there taking pictures of her head and upper torso. It can be seen how her body looks completely flat because she added color to the print afterwards. The colors are meant to make her body look like the lake. Her hair is meant to look like the shoreline sand and the rest of her is blue because she is the lake. It is understandable now why Smith wanted her body to be flat because it symbolizes the ground. She herself has become Mother Nature.

                Kara walker is an African American painter who is famous for panoramic friezes where she cut the silhouettes out of black paper. The black paper is put against a white wall. These friezes portray the African American history of slavery; the images are violent so they can accurately address the truth. 

                                            Kara Walker, “Renaissance Society Installation”

Walkers work above shows a man hunched over a banjo. The cutting is done in such detail that one can see the drool falling from his mouth suggesting that maybe the man is in pain and not in control of his body. He has a key stabbed in his back where a little girl is about to turn it and wind the man up. Viewers could get several messages from this work. Since her work depicts slavery, one could conjecture that the man is being overworked and is tired, but no one cares about his health. They just want the man to be all wound up again so he can continue his job.

             Marlene Dumas is an artist born in South Africa. She is focused more on painting and always paints from a source, either a photograph that is obtained through media or a photograph that she herself has taken. Dumas was inspired by abstract painters and you can see it in her work as her paintings are not realistic. They are an abstract representation of the original subject.  Her paintings are contemporary, portraying what is happening in the world at the time. 

                                                  “The White Disease”, Marlene Dumas

One of Dumas’s contemporary works was during the disease of apartheid. She painting an ageing woman from South Africa. This is a medical photograph that showed a sick woman. Dumas captures her pale ghostly skin and you can see there is barely any life in the painting, symbolizing death is on its way. The painting is more abstract than realistic because one can see the face is not detailed. Still, Dumas manages to capture the illness and the lifeless state of the woman. The colors are watery so it gives the painting a transparency that adds emphasis to the illness and the “withering” of the human body rather than being saturated colors which would have bought life to the painting instead.

 Barbara Kruger, from America, is a conceptual artist. She is known as a feminist artist and her work is known to arise questions from the viewer. She uses bold phrases and words that are put together from magazines and gives a new meaning to them. She first develops her ideas on a computer and then transfers them to the posters which are often very huge. The size of her posters are often billboard size.

                                           “Your body is a battleground”, Barbara Kruger

She created a poster for the women’s march in 1989 that read “your body is a battleground”. It was in support to women for legal abortion. She is fighting for a woman’s right of her own body. Basically if the body is the battleground then the person has to fight in it to obtain the rights to it. Kruger works with words because they have more power according to her in determining who the person is and who they want to be in the future. 

                                                 “I shop therefore I am”, Barbara Kruger

This slogan by Kruger allows the viewer to think of material consumption. She is challenging the idea of consumption. She keeps everything simple and colorless so the viewers’ attention is grabbed by the vivid red.