I’m Nicolette Tsamos, a senior student studying to receive my BFA in Painting/Drawing. My current art practice is driven by an awareness and dissatisfaction with social and environmental conditions and their relation to one another. Aspects of environmental detriment such as urbanization inherently impacting the contamination of water, increased flooding, decreased quality of life for biota, habitat loss, and fragmentation, etc. are largely impacting our communities.
This strained relationship between humans and our urban environments highlights what our ecosystems could look like, versus what they do, and how our current standards for management actively deteriorate them, simultaneously disproportionately affecting people of color and disadvantaged populations. Artist, Nedko Butzev, influences my practice with his work. He highlights disparities in pollution by location, drawing comparisons to standards in one area to another. I look to create subtle statements on these conditions similarly.
Sontag remarked, “a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects”. This quote reminded me of Lee Miller’s work. I recently watched her biopic highlighting her work for Vogue during WWII, capturing the unknown inhumanities taking place at the time. Work like hers, personal, random, honest, and unreplicable, is extremely valuable to the integrity of our history and understanding concepts outside of ourselves. Being able to view these “innocent” moments in a stranger's life connects us to the idea that our individual experiences are still tied to a greater overall human existence, where we are responsible for upholding each other. We sometimes take a lack of responsibility for others and I think it can remove meaning from our individual experiences.
Additionally, Sontag makes the statement that “[t]o collect photographs is to collect the world”. This stuck out to me because I agree, and have always seen the value in keeping photographs since I was a child. I used to have a very strong fear of forgetting, and now that I am a forgetful adult, I am glad that I have some of the images that I do. When we maintain these photographs, we allow ourselves to remember life.
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Some people might argue that urbanization is actually a good thing for the world.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.unfpa.org/urbanization#readmore-expand
Interesting to read about pros and cons!