Poverty Is The Gift that Keeps on Giving

I Love drawing. I espeically love drawing cities. These series of bad documented pictures is a traditional way of documenting a changing landscape. By using drawing and my style, i am able to allow ideas of localism and culture and energy of an original city gives off. One piece in particularily, made in the first semester “Suspended Animation” is a focal point and interesting when discussing how it is to be exhibitied. As a Viewer you can feel disconnected from the city whilst looking at the work. An exalted sense of being a part of abandonment in which we lose ourselves in the company of others, produces a kind of social sublime: an ex­alted sense of being part of a vast civic organ – just like the city. This work is a process to try and help connect the audience through our own loneliness. As Walter Benjamin wrote,

 

“EMPATHY IS THE NATURE OF THE INTOX­ICATION TO WHICH THE FLANEUR ABAN­DONS HIMSELF IN THE CROWD.”[1]

Indeed, this work can helps us knit us into this inspiring congregation of spectatorship, but amidst the discord of the city it also lets us keep to ourselves, alone together- a different, but related a communal space of the room in which this piece could be viewed in. The structure of how I want this to be viewed embodies exactly this affiliated togetherness and individual­ity. The buildings are like us, just fragments of a larger system that remain a lonely crowd when they’re all looking the same together.


[1] Walter Benjamin, The Arcade

< Created APRIL 2008