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| "Los Dos Fridas" by Frida Khalo |
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| Collage by Hannah Hoch |
With this project, I wanted to pile the different aspects of myself from the “American”
perspective and the “Colombian” perspective specifically, things that not only I can understand
but everyone else can relate to. I wanted to include items that have either a symbolic meaning to
them or items/images/ideals that I’ve grown up with or been associated with by others. When it
came to text or written words/phrases, I wanted to utilize words that resonates with each half
of this project. One quote that I related so much to this project was Hannah Hoch’s which
states, “ we were building things, we said we put our works together like fitters.” And with
this project I wanted each piece to work together like cogs in a watch.
My project addressed the divide between the two hemispheres between my two aspects of myself. Throughout my entire life, I have always been tugged between either being too Colombian to be
American or too American to be Colombian, and to be fully honest, I always thought it was so
foolish. This is why I named my piece “una huevonada” or the foolishness/stupidity because I always thought that my two hemispheres is one combined aspect of me instead of separate entities.
This reminds me of a Cindy Sherman text, “I think it has made me realize that we’ve all chosen
who we are in terms of how we want the world to see us.”
The piece mainly depicts a scale that “keeps the balance” of my two hemispheres with the scale having the title “huevonada” depicting how foolish the necessity of this unwanted scale is in my
life. I also took the American flag and the Colombian flag and shredded it then paste them on the
canvas to indicate the fragmented pieces of both counties and their respective cultures that represent me.
I also symbolized the fragmentedness to represent how imperfect the two hemispheres are and
how they don’t wholeheartedly shape me equally.
I have photocopied a drawing that I made out of colored pastels and split the copy in
half to show the two sides of myself, literally. On the Colombian side, there is a doll
that my aunt made when I was a child (far left), and always told me that the doll
“looks like me” as she stitched my name on it. At first, I thought she was joking as
the doll looks nothing like me physically however, upon closer inspection, I felt like she
was inadvertently suggesting that I was different/distant from the rest of my family.
I noticed the other dolls that she has made for her nieces and nephews and I notice they
all have a darker complexion and darker hair than my doll. I have the doll placed on the Colombian side of my family to suggest how I feel among my Colombian half, like a drop of water in
the sand, although the water sifts through the sand, the drop of water will never turn into the sand.
However, on the American side, I have a small bus that comes out from the right side of my face a “Chiva” or a party bus. This party bus can be seen for miles with its bright colors and loud music
from this point, I feel like a little Chiva in the states or too Colombian to be American. No one who “looks” like me will be considered “American”, the first thing people see is a Hispanic/Latina.
The word “American” will always be associated with the “minority identity” and that goes for every “minority” in the US (Hispanic American, African American, Muslim American). “Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit
imperatives of taste and conscience. (Susan Sontag).
The sprout represents how my foundation and roots all started in the US along with
the mixture of languages spread evenly across the page. All the English words speak for themselves but the Spanish slang is words that I grew up along such as “Chevere” which means
awesome or “Rumbiar” which means to party. I mostly wanted to annotate positive
words in both languages since both languages make up an equal portion of my life
whether spoken, written, or read. Altogether, I feel like I encapsulated my identity together
in this collage and expressed it in a manner in which both sides have an equal amount
of exposure.
Mirzoeff textbook, How to See the World
“As Apollo astronaut Russell (“Rusty”) Schweickart put it, the image conveys:
the thing is a whole, the Earth is a whole, and it’s so beautiful. You wish you could take a person
in each hand, one from each side in the various conflicts, and say, “Look. Look at it from this
perspective. Look at that. What’s important?”
The Image of Earth places into perspective the issues of the world today. After looking at the image you realize how minuscule our problems with society are and how in the end of it all, we all live on this one planet and we all have a responsibility to take care if it.
In 2013, 184 million pictures were tagged as selfies on Instagram alone. The selfie is a
a striking example of how once elite pursuits have become a global visual culture.
At one time, self-portraits were the preserve of a highly skilled few. Now anyone
with a camera phone can make one.
It really places in perspective how easily and at our fingertips how we can take and preserve a photograph digitally while just a few years back, it was a complete luxury to have photographs, especially a photo album.
Wangechi Mutu Dresses Cultural Critique in Freakishly Beautiful Disguises
“Photomontage could be used not merely to produce things heavy with political meaning
. . . but . . . one could also regard it as a means of self-expression and eventually arrive at purely
aesthetic works.”
This explains so much about how art is utilized today and how some art is now commercialized
to an extreme that it has become suited for everyone to manipulate and own.
Mutu says. As she puts it, “The art world is not where true urgency exists.
I feel like art in general is a place in which the soul is exposed and all facts are blown out of proportion.
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