I think that the biggest theme that surround my work is death and memory. My work has always been personal, and each piece always has some sort of visual culture reference or has been inspired by what I have seen or experienced depending upon the time of making it. To me, these three pieces represent different ‘deaths’ the first piece a death of self- similar to a self portrait, the second is the death of consciousness or self awareness, and the third is death in a mystical, ominous way. This big idea of my series is exploring how death is portrayed in different ways and how that can cause the viewer to experience different emotions about death. As a culture, we have been taught to fear death, find ways to avoid it at all costs but to me, death has been a constant fixture in my life, from the death of self to motivation and the loss of cultures and experiences that I wish I had that grew out of wanderlust for a time gone by. I crave for memories, whether it be personal ones to cultural ones like the feminist punk movements of the 70s to remembering what it is like to feel happy.
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To Wake the Dead (2015) Watercolor, gouache on paper
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Looking for an artist dealing with death, I found Marci Washington who creates these large-scale watercolor/gouache paintings that seem surreal, romantic and dark with the use of contrast and black within her imagery. To me, her work does have a similar eerie quality to mine aesthetically, but when reading some articles and interviews about her, I feel like we both share similar perspectives and art making processes. Her big idea to me is similar by evoking emotion from the viewer while creating dark, surrealistic compositions that have deep narratives about the subjects within their environments. I connected with how she likes to use historical novels and music to inspire her, as I have been inspired by music as well as art that I have seen in my life. She also likes to create social commentary through her works by having this historical background and knowledge. For me, although the big idea that is in these three pieces is about death, all my work in college has been about incorporating social commentary whether it be about race, gender or power.
“I want to communicate with others in a deep and meaningful nonverbal way. We are all sharing this time and place in history— my hope is that someone might look at my work and find that something emotionally clicks for them— that they might think to themselves, I know this feeling or I get this, this makes sense to me.”
Marci Washington |