The Foreigner! 2016
Websters Dictionary entry: foreigner, alien, non-native, stranger, outsider, immigrant, landed immigrant, refugee, settler, newcomer. ANTONYMS native. WORD xenophobia. With Foreigner! I explore and correlate contemporary and historical xenophobia with migration stories. The work involves research, photography, and employing mechanisms of abstraction. The material result includes pictures and didactic essays. For each piece to come alive, I hope readers will interact with the artwork. I, therefore, show or share as publicly as possible to expose the work- for example, hanging the work outside the cafeteria. The accompanying essays supply topical information to inspire viewer reaction. Working through the intimacy of family history punctuates the contemporaneity. It personalizes the plight characterizing today’s stake in local and international political violence fueled by racist discourses and waves of social amnesia. I work within a framework of actions to overcome resistance between the intimate, the art materials, and the external world. I open a topic with photographic clues. Then, deepen the narrative by employing metaphor rather than literal storytelling. Authenticity, representation, and presence, in my view, belong to figurative art. Mechanisms of abstraction generate a discourse with anything I cannot see. Using a symbolic abstraction to convey a contradiction of ideas.
Please stay tuned for full image documentation of my thesis exhibition at the Vermont College of Fine Art.