Research Thesis
Tragedies are not “out there”, they happen close to home and are constantly influencing the lives of those around us. Although we do not need to fall into complete grief every time a soul leaves this world we can make a conscious decision to remember them. This body of work was created to raise awareness of the physical affects of tragedies and disasters on children, as well as to heighten people’s consciousness about public memorials.
This body of work progresses through a general outlook on disasters towards a more specific location. Beginning with the subject of worldwide events, “What About the Kids?” discusses the affects of war and man-made disasters on children. This series consists of silhouettes of children with their potential future being displayed. The use of the silhouette emerged from the work of Kara Walker. She describes her use of silhouettes as a reduction of human beings to physical appearance (Walker). This reduction makes the kids become a symbol, generalizing them as children as a whole, rather than one specific child. It allows their present to be any period in time rather than a specific time defined by their appearance. Although the events portrayed in the work are not a distinct time and place, they have aspects of them that put them in a definite event. The work of Jonathan Hobin, with his series Playroom, uses imagery that he states are ‘so ingrained in our culture, they’re instantly recognizable’ (Casey). The coloured images in “What About the Kids?” are used to define a potential future that the children are playing out. Putting disaster and children together can be unnerving to the viewer. By creating an uncomfortable scenario I hope to make people more aware of children and their whereabouts in tragedies and disasters both past and present.
Forgetting about children is an easy thing to do, as the work in “Don’t Forget Me (A-Z)” expresses. This series contains 25 obituaries of children that died within the province of BC. The information that is found on the prints is accurate to their deaths. The names are blocked out to exacerbate the fact that the general population has forgotten their name. They become ‘the kids that died when…’ This theory follows the work of Jenny Holzer, in which she eliminates information from the viewer with strike throughs and full areas of paint. By omitting text from the viewer she withholds information, which counters the compulsion to turn and ignore with a desire to see and know more (NewsGrist). The same could be said for “Don’t Forget Me (A-Z). By refusing the personal information to the viewer, it makes the desire for more information increase. It also to make it more blatant that they have been forgotten because nobody gets to know their names, viewers only get partial information.
“Don’t Forget Me (A-Z)”, has a more specific time and place of the tragedies. It focuses on the deaths of young people ages 0-18 within BC in the year 1991. The choice of the year 1991 is because it was the year I was born, “a life for a life” as the saying goes, and the choice of BC is because it centralizes the tragedies closer to where people will view this body of work the most. The obituaries that make up this series were created from the death certificates of children found in the Royal BC Museum archives, one from each letter of the alphabet found on the site. They are displayed in a typological manner to mimic newspaper obituaries, which follows the work of Arnaud Maggs’ Notification xiii. Magg’s Notification xiii is “192 photos of late nineteenth and early twentieth French envelopes […] The black contour, forming an x-shape on the back […] distinguishes them as mourning stationary, which was used as death notices. “(National Gallery). The sheer magnitude of these envelopes is what makes the work impactful. In this manner, the 25 obituaries is not nearly enough to fully capture the 229 deaths recorded in the Royal BC Museum archives, but it is a start. Peter Simpson writes for the Ottawa Citizen in an article about Maggs’ Notifications series stating that “from a few steps back it looks like a collage […] but get closer and the sad truth of the image becomes clear.” By making the obituaries the same size you would find in a newspaper, “Don’t Forget Me (A-Z)” attempts to capture this same effect that the ‘sad truth becomes clear’ to closer you go to the work. Obituaries are a well-known form of a public declaration that a loved one has passed away. They can also be thought of as a type of public monument because the deaths found in obituaries are forevermore stuck in the archives of that newspaper.
The roadside crosses of “Tombstones” are public monuments found in Kelowna and close surrounding areas. Public monuments are something Ai Weiwei and Christian Boltanski are well versed in. Ai Weiwei’s Snake Ceiling is a “serpentine sculpture that commemorated the more than 5,000 school children who were killed when their shoddily constructed schools collapsed” during the earthquake on May 12, 2008 in China’s Sichuan province (Art Gallery of Ontario). His work publically displays the deaths of the five thousand children through the use of backpacks to represent each death. In and around Kelowna there are roadside crosses that commemorate those that died due to some sort of collision with a vehicle. Other places in the world display their deaths on the road differently. My father traveled to Chile and recounted that the Chilean’s would build rock piles for every death that occurred on the road. White crosses are the citizen’s of Kelowna’s way of commemorating their dead. I chose to photograph them instead of screen-print to be able to fully capture the essence of the crosses. The work of Christian Boltanski also discusses this subject. He uses photographs to recall the past and to revisit the experience of historical events. Boltanski finds and re-photographs everyday documents […] to memorialize everyday people (Guggenheim). In this way, “Tombstones” can be seen as memorializing the everyday scene of the roadside crosses. . These ‘memorials’, or photographs of public memorials, are ways to remind the viewer not to forget the individuals who died. Unfortunately, to most viewers including myself, their physical locations have become a part of the surrounding cityscape, and therefore are regularly overlooked.
Overlooking public memorials defeats the purpose of them. So does forgetting the names of those that have passed. This body of work started with not wanting to forget children and evolved into not forgetting them in death. It is my way to exhibit my concern about forgetting loved ones, no matter the age, and my way to voice to everyone who has lost someone too soon that they will never be forgotten.
Citations
Casey, Brad. “Jonathan Hobin Re-Creates the World’s Most Infamous Tragedies With
Children” Vice Magazine. Apr 29. 2013. Web. Sept 25. 2013.
“Jenny Holzer : Archive” NewsGrist. N.P. May 19, 2006. Web. Nov 21. 2013.
“Arnaud Maggs, Notification xiii, 1996, printed 1998” National Gallery of Canada.,
N.P., Web. Nov. 21, 2013.
McCall, Anthony. “Berlin Weekend 2012 – Jenny Holzer” Mousse Magazine N.p.,
May,5 2012. Web. Nov 21. 2013.
Simpson, Peter. “Arnaud Maggs on time, change and repetition at National Gallery”
Ottawa Citizen. Post Media Network, Inc., May 4, 2012., Web. Nov. 26, 2013.
Walker, Kara. “Kara Walker discusses the significance of the silhouette” Learn
Walker Art. Walker Art Centre. Sept. 29, 2013. Mp3
“Ai Weiwei’s Snake Ceiling” Art Gallery of Ontario., N.P., Web. April 10, 2014.
“Boltanski in Guggenheim” Guggenhiem Museums and Foundations., N.P., Web February 28, 2014.
Tragedies are not “out there”, they happen close to home and are constantly influencing the lives of those around us. Although we do not need to fall into complete grief every time a soul leaves this world we can make a conscious decision to remember them. This body of work was created to raise awareness of the physical affects of tragedies and disasters on children, as well as to heighten people’s consciousness about public memorials.
This body of work progresses through a general outlook on disasters towards a more specific location. Beginning with the subject of worldwide events, “What About the Kids?” discusses the affects of war and man-made disasters on children. This series consists of silhouettes of children with their potential future being displayed. The use of the silhouette emerged from the work of Kara Walker. She describes her use of silhouettes as a reduction of human beings to physical appearance (Walker). This reduction makes the kids become a symbol, generalizing them as children as a whole, rather than one specific child. It allows their present to be any period in time rather than a specific time defined by their appearance. Although the events portrayed in the work are not a distinct time and place, they have aspects of them that put them in a definite event. The work of Jonathan Hobin, with his series Playroom, uses imagery that he states are ‘so ingrained in our culture, they’re instantly recognizable’ (Casey). The coloured images in “What About the Kids?” are used to define a potential future that the children are playing out. Putting disaster and children together can be unnerving to the viewer. By creating an uncomfortable scenario I hope to make people more aware of children and their whereabouts in tragedies and disasters both past and present.
Forgetting about children is an easy thing to do, as the work in “Don’t Forget Me (A-Z)” expresses. This series contains 25 obituaries of children that died within the province of BC. The information that is found on the prints is accurate to their deaths. The names are blocked out to exacerbate the fact that the general population has forgotten their name. They become ‘the kids that died when…’ This theory follows the work of Jenny Holzer, in which she eliminates information from the viewer with strike throughs and full areas of paint. By omitting text from the viewer she withholds information, which counters the compulsion to turn and ignore with a desire to see and know more (NewsGrist). The same could be said for “Don’t Forget Me (A-Z). By refusing the personal information to the viewer, it makes the desire for more information increase. It also to make it more blatant that they have been forgotten because nobody gets to know their names, viewers only get partial information.
“Don’t Forget Me (A-Z)”, has a more specific time and place of the tragedies. It focuses on the deaths of young people ages 0-18 within BC in the year 1991. The choice of the year 1991 is because it was the year I was born, “a life for a life” as the saying goes, and the choice of BC is because it centralizes the tragedies closer to where people will view this body of work the most. The obituaries that make up this series were created from the death certificates of children found in the Royal BC Museum archives, one from each letter of the alphabet found on the site. They are displayed in a typological manner to mimic newspaper obituaries, which follows the work of Arnaud Maggs’ Notification xiii. Magg’s Notification xiii is “192 photos of late nineteenth and early twentieth French envelopes […] The black contour, forming an x-shape on the back […] distinguishes them as mourning stationary, which was used as death notices. “(National Gallery). The sheer magnitude of these envelopes is what makes the work impactful. In this manner, the 25 obituaries is not nearly enough to fully capture the 229 deaths recorded in the Royal BC Museum archives, but it is a start. Peter Simpson writes for the Ottawa Citizen in an article about Maggs’ Notifications series stating that “from a few steps back it looks like a collage […] but get closer and the sad truth of the image becomes clear.” By making the obituaries the same size you would find in a newspaper, “Don’t Forget Me (A-Z)” attempts to capture this same effect that the ‘sad truth becomes clear’ to closer you go to the work. Obituaries are a well-known form of a public declaration that a loved one has passed away. They can also be thought of as a type of public monument because the deaths found in obituaries are forevermore stuck in the archives of that newspaper.
The roadside crosses of “Tombstones” are public monuments found in Kelowna and close surrounding areas. Public monuments are something Ai Weiwei and Christian Boltanski are well versed in. Ai Weiwei’s Snake Ceiling is a “serpentine sculpture that commemorated the more than 5,000 school children who were killed when their shoddily constructed schools collapsed” during the earthquake on May 12, 2008 in China’s Sichuan province (Art Gallery of Ontario). His work publically displays the deaths of the five thousand children through the use of backpacks to represent each death. In and around Kelowna there are roadside crosses that commemorate those that died due to some sort of collision with a vehicle. Other places in the world display their deaths on the road differently. My father traveled to Chile and recounted that the Chilean’s would build rock piles for every death that occurred on the road. White crosses are the citizen’s of Kelowna’s way of commemorating their dead. I chose to photograph them instead of screen-print to be able to fully capture the essence of the crosses. The work of Christian Boltanski also discusses this subject. He uses photographs to recall the past and to revisit the experience of historical events. Boltanski finds and re-photographs everyday documents […] to memorialize everyday people (Guggenheim). In this way, “Tombstones” can be seen as memorializing the everyday scene of the roadside crosses. . These ‘memorials’, or photographs of public memorials, are ways to remind the viewer not to forget the individuals who died. Unfortunately, to most viewers including myself, their physical locations have become a part of the surrounding cityscape, and therefore are regularly overlooked.
Overlooking public memorials defeats the purpose of them. So does forgetting the names of those that have passed. This body of work started with not wanting to forget children and evolved into not forgetting them in death. It is my way to exhibit my concern about forgetting loved ones, no matter the age, and my way to voice to everyone who has lost someone too soon that they will never be forgotten.
Citations
Casey, Brad. “Jonathan Hobin Re-Creates the World’s Most Infamous Tragedies With
Children” Vice Magazine. Apr 29. 2013. Web. Sept 25. 2013.
“Jenny Holzer : Archive” NewsGrist. N.P. May 19, 2006. Web. Nov 21. 2013.
“Arnaud Maggs, Notification xiii, 1996, printed 1998” National Gallery of Canada.,
N.P., Web. Nov. 21, 2013.
McCall, Anthony. “Berlin Weekend 2012 – Jenny Holzer” Mousse Magazine N.p.,
May,5 2012. Web. Nov 21. 2013.
Simpson, Peter. “Arnaud Maggs on time, change and repetition at National Gallery”
Ottawa Citizen. Post Media Network, Inc., May 4, 2012., Web. Nov. 26, 2013.
Walker, Kara. “Kara Walker discusses the significance of the silhouette” Learn
Walker Art. Walker Art Centre. Sept. 29, 2013. Mp3
“Ai Weiwei’s Snake Ceiling” Art Gallery of Ontario., N.P., Web. April 10, 2014.
“Boltanski in Guggenheim” Guggenhiem Museums and Foundations., N.P., Web February 28, 2014.