Anyway, I'm very sorry to any/all of you who have been searching for my Writing One; it disappeared into the ether when the wifi was glitching Wednesday night. Here's the text from that, since I can't figure out how to post an attachment in a Moodle comment.
Lucy McInnes, Writing One
As I understand it,
visual culture encompasses the physical manifestations of art, the written and
spoken discussions, the theories of art is it relates to itself, to politics,
to religion, to social media and social identities. Visual art is that physical representation of
the social/mental/verbal creativity. Visual culture exists everywhere, but the
visual art brings elements of that culture together, forms a conscious
narrative in response to the cultural setting.
The visual culture exists all around us; beginning with the color blocks
and picture books of childhood, the culturally understood symbols pervade the
entirety of our world. Cartoon people in pants or skirts, the national flag, a
simplified black stick-man on a yellow diamond-shaped road sign, parodies of
classic paintings, all of these symbols and more comprise a non-verbal dialog
on which we as humans – primarily in Western society – have agreed. Visual culture and visual art are like a Venn
diagram from science class; the visual culture informs the visual art and vice
versa, but while all of visual art relates to the overarching visual culture,
some of the visual culture exists outside of visual art.
Sturken and
Cartwright’s presentation of reflection versus representation Sturken and
Cartwright also point out the ways in which visual art has critiqued the
assumed veracity of these visual cultural images. In Magritte’s “La Trahison
des Images” (The Treachery of Images), the visual art critiques the assumptions
of the visual culture. Magritte and those who follow his line of thought draw
the viewer’s attention to the degree to which our world – our species – relies
so heavily on visual information as to interpret the images as the object. This article also discusses the “myth of
photographic truth” and the myriad ways that our lives in this culture and time
are framed for us within a greater visual narrative. Our culture has become so overwhelmingly
visual that the photograph is taken as an absolute and incontrovertible truth,
though different photographers and points of view can present varying values of
truth about the same scene. A truer
interpretation of any image relies on multiple sources of information and
interpretation, using denotative and connotative meaning and many forms of
context for each image.
The artwork I make
takes its form in closely equal parts from the world of visual arts, the
greater visual culture, and the literary/visual culture bases in science
fiction and science fantasy. My art examines extant mutations within past and present
taxonomies (primarily small mammals, plants, and reptiles) and extrapolates
from there. Some questions I try to ask or answer in this body of work
include, What would happen if animals had evolved differently? Could these two families or classes, kingdoms
even, be combined in an at least somewhat plausible creature? What is the purpose of this creature in its
environment, and how does the larger ecosystem work around its inhabitants? My purpose is to ask these questions of both myself and the viewer, and I relish the possible answers.
