Barriers: Their place in my work.

The newest part of my artwork and photographs will be the inclusion of barriers in the background as a key or representation of something that separates places, people, and things. The inclusion of these physical objects will be in the background, and probably won’ t be actually separating two of me physically in the image, but it is there as context clues, as something that is there to emphasize and reinforce the work. One of the definitions of a barrier is something immaterial that impedes or separates. In my own work, the barrier is a physical material, but resembles and reflects the separation of something immaterial, personal, and intimate. The large barriers first came from me watching a movie called Wings of Desire, a very powerful movie, where the Berlin Wall was used as a barrier. The wall was never actually addressed in the piece, yet it lingered in the background to emphasize a separation and difference within and throughout the film. This is the same effect that I want to give off with the use of a barrier of sorts in the back of my own pieces. I feel it functions just as other tools that I am using, including the reflections, color, bridges, and rope. Below are just a few examples of what I mean by a barrier, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a wall.


http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/barriers

Cang Xin is an artist born in Suihua, in the Chinese province of Heilongjiang in 1967. Surprisingly, Cang Xin was a performance artist originally, and studied at the Tianjin Academy of Music in China. He currently works in China, and creates art pieces that I feel have a similar style to my own work. A specific collection I am referring to is in the Deborah Colton Gallery, and in this series, he talks about an identity exchange. In his images, he is photographed taking the identity of others physically, by wearing their clothes in their environment, and stands next to them, half naked and almost out of place. I get the feeling that both himself, and the one he takes the identity from feels somewhat naked, in both mental state and physical place. In relation to my own work, I put emphasis on the clothing as a way to express the mental state I am going through, and it is good to hear and see that others are using physical objects such as clothing to help successfully explain the internal struggles and problems of people. Pictured below are some of the photographs of Cang Xin’s work.

His work really shows a different way of expressing a similar issue that I am dealing with. It’s given me an idea of how I could express my identity problems in another way. I thought of creating portraits of me from others, in a collage style piece. Maybe in the future, I will explore this style a little more.

http://www.artnet.com/ag/fulltextsearch.asp?searchstring=identity¤tCategory=Artwork&page=3