Extra Credit Artist Talk
At 1:45 on Thursday, February 27th 2020 I went to a Georgia State Artist talk by Coorain. Coorain was recapping the work he made with his photo scholarship. He also discussed a trip he got to take last year to Levittown and Paradise Gardens.
From what I gathered he did a piece that was somewhat performance but mostly photo based where he dressed up as a woman in a pink wig and laid on a fancy bed in a honeymoon hotel suite. This piece was meant to represent the kind of fake/kind of real experiences of a honeymoon. He explained that everyone goes to a fancy hotel room right after they’ve been hitched and it is very real for them. It is their first night together as a couple. However it's fake and not special at all because literally everyone does it. One couple leaves the room and then it is cleaned and the next couple enters. It's the exact same romantic setting/moment being repeated.Â
He also did a piece in Levittown on the suburbs. Why you may ask well because Levittown, Long Island, is the most famous American postwar suburban development. It was a household name, the “Exhibit A” of suburbia. It came on the eve of the baby boom and just before the 1948 Housing Bill liberalized lending, allowing anyone to buy a home with 5 percent down and extending mortgage terms to 30 years.Â
Coorain wanted to know what America was like in the 50s, what the middle class was like, and what he called “the first utopia suburb, lover town” was like. He found that things were made around technology in the suburbs. For instance houses were built to fit televisions and cars, not people’s styles.Â
The next place he visited was Paradise Gardens, which he called the third utopia. There he studied Howard Finster. Coorain liked Finster’s mosaics and the way Finster looked at things. To him Finster’s work symbolized how you can make beautiful things out of nothing, much like God. According to him Finster really thinks about his materials and what they mean. He thinks about history in a sense that he wants his work to last and one day become a part of it.
Overall, I was not really a fan of Coorain’s work in general. However, Coorain was a very interesting artist with some very cool and interesting ideas.Â