One of the artist that I picked from the Visual Arts Gallery at the Place: The Locus of Memory, A Neo-Latino Exhibition was Sergio G. Villamizar. He’s a Postmodern Neo-Conceptual “expressionist” artist and currently resides North Bergen, New Jersey. His piece, “The Home Sweet Home” (2015) was made out of images manipulated collage done on photo shop. His work is exhibited in the Visual Arts Gallery at NJCU Art Building. In this collage the viewer sees a variety of different types of forms of transportation such as of trains, cars, airplanes, and much more. It also showcases the environment of a chaotic industrial location. In the piece, it also exhibits a lot of store front names. There’s movement within the piece because your eye wants to move and see what’s there. In his statement, he mentions about his home and what he sees around him. The idea that that no matter how claustrophobic and cluttered a place can be there are still this constant urge to keep building more structures. In Susan Sontag’s “On Photography”, she mentions “The idea of a photograph tells you how to look at things and what to focus on. How to understand other people’s perspectives.” This supports Villamizar identifying with where he lives and what are his surroundings. 
In John Berger’s “Way of Seeing”, he states “Publicity is, in essence, nostalgic. It has to sell the past to the future.” I believe that showing all the different company brands, and noticing that throughout how many years their branding is still relevant till this day, doesn’t matter the time era. The branding is timeless and has value because the consumer remembers it. The can recycle the idea because in hindsight it never gets old. Quality over quantity. I believe that I was drawn to this piece because it is what’s now and what I’ve related to all my life, a city that’s being gentrified. This work can be considered an example of intervention, for example we can question, “Are we ok with change within a place we call home?” “The people who are moving into are city based on costs and convenience” It creates awareness because when there’s too much of anything it can be overwhelming and corporations just care about making profit than the living situations of people who have been in those cities for all their lives.
The other art piece I chose was Josephine Barreiro’s Sticker Bombs, Reykjavik, Iceland (2018). The medium is a metal photo print. She is a daughter of immigrants from Spain and born in Newark, NJ. She has a deep connection towards graffiti, street art and abstract expressionism. I feel the stickers are another form of branding in the environment. People usually create stickers to make a statement or create awareness to a certain thing. The fact that the stickers are on a street sign, is an easy target for people to look straight at because people have to look at it in regards to crossing the street. Graffiti usually is a way to express for social causes and at the same time have a cool aesthetic to get people’s attention. In John Berger’s “Way of Seeing”, he states “Publicity exerts an enormous influence and is a political phenomenon of great importance.” The power of publicity is the fact that it can reach out to people and give them some sort of enlightenment or question whatever sticker art they see. It’s just another method of sharing your message across. “Publicity is the life of this culture – in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive – and at the same time publicity is its dream.” People have to be attracted in some form to be interested in something. Creating content in a sense is part of culture and a movement to create a statement depending on the political or social issue that our era is going thru. The articles that I picked are based on the relation to the two art pieces I picked. One article explains what happens to a neighborhood when there’s change/gentrification. How people can’t afford the rent once homes are being built more luxurious and how it affects the people who are currently living there. In the article, what really got to me was this statement, “The reality is that the displaced are getting pushed out of working-class neighborhoods that are “good enough” to attract people and investment, while the poorest and most vulnerable neighborhoods remain mired in persistent poverty and concentrated disadvantage.” Then that opens the conversation of what is considered “good enough” to attract people, and what certain people. The other article I read brings up the topic of what art work people want visible to make a statement. The same idea of stickers, people want that to be visible for people to see and make a statement and question it.
Citation:Villamizar,S.(2015) Artwork Statement. Visual Arts Gallery. New Jersey City University.
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corp. and Penguin Books.
Susan Sontag article on photography
Web Articles:
- This Is What Happens After a Neighborhood Gets Gentrified - Street Art in Northern Ireland: TheVoice Of A New Generation
No comments:
Post a Comment