Italozazen

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Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Musk up as a conceptual work

A response to mask up and over. Firstly to investigate its function as a mask the reference to political voice, freedom to express, and the role of advocacy as a public good. The side with abstract designs is a flip side to world politics authoritarian modes since the pandemic began in early 2020. The civic freedoms to travel repressed to a degree unknown to many generations, even boomers.

Material composition of mask up art

Fiberglass core with fabric and painted print, linocut. A photograph taken in 2015 while traveling through Indonesia of a street mural and then printed, layered with resin, and painted (oil, textile, ink, water-based paints). The steel frame permits multiple modes of attachment and angles of the work. This is part of a current series of works. There is a retrospective of artworks from the early 1990’s that reference the mouth.

Syncretic

The syncretic aspect of mask up is to do with blending of aesthetic styles in line with functional of a medical nature. The depiction itself has a bold text style that if worn in public would be a kind of advocacy for the new rules. A key conceptual element with syncretism is to borrow and blend. So with any rapid shift in cultural norms, which is in this case a global trend can bring up interesting novel modes of expression. This artwork is a way for me to investigate the semantics of mask as a global functional modal for bio power and control.

Gnostic

This relates to the philosophy of possible states of affairs, in that we can image things having gone differently from the onset of this pandemic. The gnostic element is that the we seek to know this non visible form. It almost a spiritual form by token of not being an organism, but then also not being an inorganic compound. So the artwork plays with this grey area of the syncretic gnostic elemental nature of this event and the gaze from behind the mask.