Minsoo Thigpen | 2018 | Painting & Applied Mathematics

Deep Dancers and The Swimmer

Oil on canvas

The act of swimming, once taken at face value, can be seen as an absurd activity. People spend large amounts of time trying not drown (swim) as a recreational hobby or sport - the very act of trying to survive is the responsibility of each drowner (swimmer). Skewing spaces and contexts that The Swimmer resides in is an effort to push the absurdity of the skirt-characters I use. Most specifically in "The Swimmer" - forms often fetishized by Western Culture (skirts and legs only of adolescent girls) are deformed with cartoonish eyes that serve the Western gaze back at the viewer. In "DEEP DANCERS" - I am using Western Canon art history (Matisse's "La Danse") in the same way that Western Modernism only viewed "Oriental" art as anthropological sources of "inspiration" in order to heighten and innovate Painting of its time. As Asian art has been absent as its own art objects in popular Western art history canons without being attributed to a Western painting - I wish to (using Painting as a playing field) reclaim our history, identity, and reassert our existence and cultural force especially now in a globalized socio-political climate.

from Re: Memory, Granoff Center for the Arts, January 17 - February 13, 2017