statement

While doing research on the postmodern, I began looking at how my former work was based in Modern art.  I had been doing  ‘modern contemporary abstract looking” work and was constantly frustrated in my attempts to talk about it. Modernism distanced the viewer and was not necessarily supposed to be understood. It was art for the sake of art. Somehow, I had skipped over Postmodernism…at least the word “post-modern”. So now I was in my first year of grad school and finding out what Postmodernism was. In finding this, I also find that it is now over (at least I am hearing this in Europe from some of my tutors) and we as artist find ourselves in a transition period between the Post- modern and what is on the horizon…that which has yet to be. This realization is an exciting and challenging time for us as artists and it removes confusion and has assisted in moving me into the way I am working now.

I needed to find a way to speak about social issues, political issues, religion and globalization in a way that was not bitter and that pulled the viewer in, yet still retained the qualities of line and shape that I had always worked in. So, I have begun appropriating international flags, international signal flags, and religious flags along with skeletal forms and symbols. Hoping to speak with recognizable forms and allow the viewer to read within their own experience. It is important for me to voice my truth, but to do it in a way that is not imposing my view only but inviting the viewer to read the work for them self. My belief is that art needs to be relevant and to begin speaking to the mass global population of today.

   Hal Foster wrote brilliantly in (The Idea of the Post Modern, by Hans Bertens) when explaining the postmodern artist:

 This shift in practice entails a shift in position: the artist becomes a manipulator of signs more than a producer of art objects, and the viewer an active reader of messages rather than a passive contemplator of the aesthetic or consumer of the spectacular.

 Reading on social postmodernism, I am finding I need to make art that embraces cultural, religious and political differences.  There are qualities that are important to me within the human realm and I believe these are relatable to the viewer. We live in a multi-cultural society.  Not only in the United States…there are people living outside of their countries of origin all over the world. In that, there is a detachment from families and language barriers that add to the feelings of isolation. Borders are becoming less defined.      

 Therefore, through research and my life experience, and working through my art, I hope to mesh the modernist way I used to work with the post-modern ideas of using allegory, symbols and appropriation through art history, magazines, newspapers etc. and as well, find my way into the next new form of working or a new movement, in which the viewer can relate, as we live and cope with, the vast social, political and religious climate of today.

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 cjkaylor@hotmail.com