KIT-UP is a multi compositional syncretic media artwork.
KIT UP has a sculptural sense with four compositional perspectives. The depth aspect of this piece is primarily text-based. However, there are swirls of resin on both sides. There is a photographic paper print and, on the flip side, a fabric print on the larger sides.
KIT (essential items) UP ( for travel)
Side (height and width) A depicts the desert traveler. The essential items for a camel are food and lots of water. Surrounding the depiction are layers of paint, silk, wax, and clay. This on a metaphysical interpretation relates to being within the platitudes of everyday activities such as eating and sleeping.
Side (height and width) B has multiple layers of paint that is separated by resin where at the lower most layer emerges a fabric print of a street mural. The depiction is that of an inverted man doing a salute that resembles a protest to the rat race. However there is a metaphysical component depicting the sacred through transcendence of objective awareness.
Kit up: a tropical style
The basic sense of this artwork is tropical. The dry tropics is denoted through the camel (image taken in Rajasthan, India). The human figure is barely clothed and has a sense of being in the tropical heat, given the image was taken in the back streets of Bali, Indonesia. These object photographs form a symbiotic relation to the surrounding media as artefact.
A traveller theme
The camel is the icon of nomadic desert travel, carrying the essential kit for the arduous journey across arid lands. The swills of yellows denote the fragments of desert as a psychological factor for a traveller across such terain. The human figure is in an acrobatic inverted pose whilst doing a salute. The essential kit for a street artist social activist would be the stensil that allows quick desemination of image to surface.
Nature contrasting culture
There is a tradition in contemporary photography of contrasting nature and culture. The early 20th century photographer Lucien Clergue explored themes such as carrion eaters of the animal world, and acrobatics of the human world.
What’s the connection?
So as a painterly sculptural construction the material substance is linked to a culture of the industrial complex ( given the industrial components like steel and fibre glass) and to that end simulates an acrobatic style as media such as dried clay cling to steel but is covered by resin. However the naturalist gaze might be glimpsed from the surface features as referents to raw emotion and wonder lust. A further reference to travel and wonder lust can be surveyed about on a retrospective of the artworks from the 1990’s.
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