Dossier Annotation
CArts and rafts (or Arts and Crafts) is a dossier of artworks serving, to various degrees, as influences within my practice. With a sprinkling of general inspiration, like music and film, amongst it. These influences can be broken into five main themes; figuration, abstraction, materiality, symbol/symbolic, and text. Despite their separation, they are all intrinsically linked; overlaid in various degrees of contrast or correlation.
These titles place my collection of visual references into key layman’s terms that could just as easily be expanded into more categories incorporating a number of others. These include many of the themes discussed throughout the semester in Critical Frameworks. Such as indexes, icons, codes, expressionism, embodiment and form.
It has been very beneficial for my practice to see all these varying forms of inspiration side by side. Take for example the materiality of Jahnne Pasco-White accompanied by the overtly glorifying symbols of Frederic Remington, submerged in a soundtrack of Nick Cave. If you squint just enough, and overly compliment my making, you may just be able to see this variety of art smooshed together into the aesthetic that is my work.
This visual gathering of my differing sources has definitely been the most important aspect of this process. My practice is deeply focused on the exploration of supposed opposites and how these alternate themes, like figuration and abstraction, compliment and contrast not just within the pairs, but the whole scope. Diving into what an object represents verse what is represented; or as touched on in the dossier, the symbol verse what it symbolizes. Meaning this dossier serves almost as an instruction manual for all the parts that support my whole (practice).
The CArts and rafts dossier highlights how entangled the contextual supports of my practice are. It is not simply a case of just discovering an artist’s work, researching and then moving on. As seen, I am constantly circling and re-circling back to them; as I divert off expanding my practice and then reinforcing the original areas further at a deeper level. For example, Sam Gilliam’s work is briefly touched on towards the start of the dossier while I first began to experiment with a drop sheet in my practice at the start of the semester. I then shifted my focus onto other areas of making, such as the cowboy motif in the works of artists like Richard Prince. Eventually this motif fed into materiality and installations, leading me back round into a more in-depth investigation of Gilliam’s work via books from the library.
The final benefit of this dossier has been having these visual references, previously only accessed by sifting through a mass of personal photos (currently all of my new baby nephew) on my phone, all collected in the one place. And more importantly, instead of just my written notes on the theoretical overviews and key quotes of other artists practices, it has been highly beneficial having this dossier to post specific artworks that embody the overall themes as singular visual forms.