Subversion in Surrealist Art

For art we were to look at a different kind of art, subversion done by a surrealist artist named Giorgio De Chirico. Starting off we have a thumbnail sketch of a painting of his:

The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, 1914

The idea behind this painting seems to be around kidnapping and other shady immoral things that happen the the shadows of normal life. The wagon in the picture is hidden in the shadows and the darkness makes it hard to see what's inside the wagon. The shaded out girl and ominous shadow on the road add another aspect to the thought of kidnappings. The painting contains a lot of dark colors and tones making the painting seem more darkened and spooky. The supposed time setting of the painting is dusk just before it becomes night, perfect time for things to go bad.

In comparison to Tracey Tawhiao the painting shows a similar sense of something being covered up. Both their art seems to talk about the things that aren't completely moral but nobody cares on the larger side of the equation. For Tracey the larger side of the equation is the large of people that only know English. For Chirico it is more towards the fact that if someone does get kidnapped only family and friends will care if they are or aren't found.

Subversion For Sofia Minson

This time for art we are looking at the subversion of a different Maori artist called Sofia Minson.

This time we watched this video and now have to take notes:

In simplest form the point of Sofia's work is to look at deities, gods and religions of different cultures, then to combine the cultures into one idea.

Afterwards I made a thumbnail sketch of an artwork of hers:

It is a simple artwork but it has a sense of subversion, there appears to be a rope in the painting. The appearance of the rope makes the perch of the bird uncertain and unstable, able to change. The bird is an iconic well known bird, a tui, which is native to New Zealand. The painting could be saying that solid ideals have a flexible base or that well known things are still easy to change. She might be using the idea of something well known to inform the idea of unchanging objects.

In comparison to Tracey's work Sofia starts from a blank canvas instead of covering something but letting parts show through. Sofia is combining original ideas while Tracey is covering or recycling old ideas. Sofia does full page artwork while Tracey does grid style artwork.

Subversion for Tracey Tawhiao

Art has us looking at the subversion in Tracey's work. There was also the slight task of trying to apply it to a painting of our own creation.

In this painting one can see a lot of fish showing in various patterned styles possibly hinting toward an idea of various types of fish.

Some of the fish appear incomplete like they've been planned but not finished. It could be gesturing to the uncertainty of what we don't know about what lives down in the depths of trenches.

Most of the picture seems to have dark tones but then there's the orange square near the middle of the picture.

It has some of the fish with the look of rope on their tails, probably to look at fishing or overfishing, or maybe even plastic waste polluting the ocean.

The possibility is that she is saying people rely on the ocean too much.

Here is a painting I did from the inspiration of Tracey Tawhiao:

This painting was done in the idea of trees and their support to certain ecosystems.

The brown drabness of the left of the painting is to show the boring effects of a lack of trees and birds.

The cut down trees are to highlight the fact that a bird will nest in a tree and will eat worms and feed them to their young. With the broken egg there is the knowledge that there will be less birds to be feed or to feed.

With less birds eating the worms the worms can increase in population and damage the ecosystem.

The bird next to the standing tree s and the potted plant tree is to say: they could have cut down that tree but they cut down the one with the egg.

Tracey Tawhiao's Subversion

Our current objective in art is to research and learn about subversion in art using methods like thumbnail sketches.

One of our objectives is to take notes from the the following website:

Art is meant to subvert

The shortest I can make it is that art is supposed to subvert, it is supposed to challenge humanity and cause anger. It said you don't want to create art that everybody will just accept because that isn't art it's just entertainment.

Another task was to take a few of Tracey Tawhiao's art works and create thumbnail sketches of them:

Within Tracey's work the act of subversion is shown in the process of painting over a newspaper written in English. Tracey is a Maori artist so by doing this it is almost as if she is trying to cover up the English part of New Zealand. She doesn't make make much of an attempt to hide the fact that she is doing it over something being that sometimes she'll let things like words show through. When she paints she uses Maori patterns as if to say that the country should belong to the Maori more than the British.

For our final task we are to completely describe one of her works:

Within this piece you can see that she used Maori patterns, she used bright colors to make it stand out even more. Ones like the fish draw your eye due to the complexity and the dark green Maori pattern stands out because it's hard to see. Six words were intentionally left uncovered as if to say the whole story isn't important just a small part. Growth eclipses hold lessons for life, it could also be interpreted as, to grow things need to block out the obvious parts of life.

I'd guess that's all if not whoops.