Week 5 - Artist - Kara Walker & Russell Crotty

 

Kara Walker

Kara Walker has been working as an unrivaled female artist representing American contemporary art, especially African descent, since her first exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York, the USA, in 1994. Through her 19th-century Victorian-style shadow art, race and gender, violence and sexuality, It solved problems such as the identity of black people like a thread. Her works, which subtly combine history and present, reality and fiction, are lyrical like a fairy tale, full of wit and humor, despite the heavy subject matter.

By showing the world of fiction and fact created independently by Kara Walker, based on the historical novel, based on the situation of the southern United States before the Civil War, the problem and acceptance of race, and historical fiction, it points out where the deep-seated prejudices about race and gender originate. Walker's work has focused on racial issues in the United States, femininity, violence, sexuality, and black identity. He unleashes the historical memory of American society's overt racism without filtration by targeting male-dominated and white-dominated American society.

 

However, her work is lyrical at first glance, like a fairy tale that flows along with a beautiful melody, and wit and humor are hidden everywhere. Walker cuts her black confetti and puts it on the wall to create a backdrop reminiscent of a European puppet theatre. At the same time, she exhibits paintings and collages, moving images and animations and drawings together, allowing a wide range of interpretations of her work. By subtly blending history and present, fiction and reality, she unravels the hidden stories of her ancestors, the horrors of race, and the dark American past and women's history with only visual images.

 

 

Russell Crotty

Russell Crotty is an artist, scientist, and adventurer. He created his work by combining thorough observational drawings in various forms, from traditional sketches to books, maps, globes, and more. Crotty's approach was both conceptual and romantic at the same time. He combined the information obtained through the lens with a more subjective impression of the universe and its places. As the owner of multiple optical telescopes, Crotty studied the night sky. He expressed what he saw in a way that felt both precise and strangely primitive.

 

Crotty's globe material is fiberglass, on top of which is covered with recording paper. The artist painted the surface with translucent watercolors before drawing on it with a ballpoint pen. They vary in size, but they are usually hung with wires from the ceiling so the audience can see them from all angles. M11 is a white representation of an ambiguous constellation on a uniformly dark background. But it also depicts more familiar types of celestial bodies, such as galaxies, or includes elements of the Earth's landscape in the form of vertical lines dotted with mountains and trees.

The writings embedded in many of Crotty's works feature thorough descriptions based on meticulous field notes. And partly from vaguely remembered experiences. This hybrid writing reflects the writer's personal feelings about him or the places he has visited. Crotty's landscape drawings are similar in scale and ambition to his astronomical work and use most of the same formats. However, the artist here talks about a more intimate experience in the natural world and criticizes the negative consequences of human intervention. His surfing records a series of natural and imaginary places in drawings, watercolors, and monoprints. Most of these idealized places were created with a genuinely obsessive, tireless passion. Crotty seems to be an artist who tries to communicate with joy in nature, rare in contemporary.