Black and White Vol. I

Artist Statement

Black and White explores reciprocal functions of cultural identification.  Specifically, variations between individual freedom and social oppression.

What happens when we believe in something with all our hearts at the risk of inflicting pain upon others? How do we utilize emblematic objects and images to unify participation in cultural practices associated with absolute power and zealous conviction?

Clearly certain kinds of violence are more visible than others and indeed felt more acutely.   Concurrently, there is a tendency to focus on the evildoers of our society – criminals, thieves, gangs etc.  But what about the police and the military?  Or educational institutions and religion?   

The greater the desire for control over others, the more individual freedom is threatened, regardless of intention.  Even the subtlest forms of coercion that serve to maintain structures of authority and supremacy are experiences of violence and oppression for others.  Sometimes, the most tolerant and liberal attitudes are the most destructive. 

Or, the invisible kind of violence that we participate in everyday, something supposedly good and seemingly benign, but despite knowingly or unknowingly, sacrifices the freedom of others.   A conspiracy of silence compounded by whole-scale public denial obscures accountability, responsibility. 

Figures, blocks, buildings, spaces, silences, forms, curves, lines and colours.  Black and white is a positive and a negative, a foreground and a background, a reality and a fantasy, a right and a wrong.  It is the double meaning of what white says and what black says.  It is also about how we upset that which we desperately need to love. 

The exhibition space exposes a site of white male power and authority.   The sculptures unmask a mythology of strength and control to reveal how the oppressor shares the same disempowered space with the oppressed.  In the hiding places of cultural identification, we find there is a need to create secret spaces where we can act out fantasies of power and possession. 

Black and White makes visible the struggles between differentness and dominance, but it is a place where guilt and innocence share the same space.   I'll be the first to point a finger.