CULTURAL EXPORTS, 2017- ongoing, archival digital print, varied sizes in limited edition of 8. The works use vernacular techniques to document fables and allegories joined with poetic titles to expose ways cultures are traded as intellectual commodities. The photographs shown on the web are low resolution. For high resolution film scans or to discuss acquisition and exhibitions, contact: mariammanart@icloud.com
Artist Statement: The way I have seen systemic and market value ascribed to the most essential, or fundamental, aspects of life has continually bewildered me. These images portray a more tongue-in-cheek view of the tropes people exchange on product commerce, place and tourism, while maintaining sensitivity to the beauty of the reality.
Within the action of describing an image, the ways in which hue, value, and form can become prey to leaps of mind before further investigation. In cultures promoting happiness, lightness, brevity and efficiency, cultural production promoting introspection, dialogue, and value creation through deconstruction and constructionist means, requires an investigation of allegory relative to visual literacy. In photography, the term “image latency” or “the latent image,” points towards the appearance or memory of visual stimulation after its absence. Photography is often ascribed to be the psychological in art: a broad and often accurate claim invites pause to consider the multitude in which the idea can be excavated. Historical images can become psychological sites in a collective memory, where the meaning is performed-rote by university instruction and justified from further social inputs. The academic elitism does society a disservice in this way, while an indignant worker loses opportunities for varied development by excluding oneself from the dialogue. In a historical lineage of studies including psychology and art criticism, pathologizing images enters contemporary, political dialogue. The actors or roles of these authors relative to the writing of cultural value carry a greater responsibility to humility than to power. This is to say, the museum guide is not always an expert, and bias must always be factored into reading or hearing speech relative to both the framework and presentation of works.
Photography can perform as a language of the body given the optic nerves relationship to the central nervous system. To address mindless thought circuits as self-repeating feedback loops, or self-affirming values, a comparison between taste and virtue can be comprised of descriptors such as bright, sharp, vibrant, dull. The figuration or imagination of abstract forms can be deemed with similar affects relative to cultural foundations. This cultural foundation are increasingly shared due to the internet, social media, and the gentrification of culture itself mirrored in mass biodiversity extinction. Therefore the prevalence of accepting poor images justified by a “brand” mirrors marketing jargon by defining social actions of happiness, lightness, brevity and efficiency missing on reflexivity, emptying cognitive bias through comparing facts and suspending conclusiveness, or suspending agreement with oneself without pause to work towards congruence. Agreeing to our counterparts without pause, skipping onto the next task of busy-ness, begins (in quite a short time) to feel hollow, empty and energy depleting. When this action extends to the consumption of art, the setting forth a quest for meaning or way to be content with the felt void carved within bodies tends to prefer culture production already verified and checked by the experts. When the repetition of this phenomena goes relatively unchanged since the 1970’s, the mainstream runs devoid of subtle nutrition.
As a child learns where reliable food sources originate, adults are learned where reliable forms of confirmation bias originate. This social landscape, often referred to in language today as “the people” or “common folk” or “the mainstream”, can be found hanging well beyond any impulse to attempt to join a different wave, that of critical dialogue. These dialogues can be held within and beyond sites of art and culture production. Perhaps criticism is avoided since the notion of negative is often derived to mean destructive, when positivity in excess can also destroy. The petri-dish like conditions of a culture can create insularity, narcissism, fear, mono-cultures, and other non-generative forces. This style of counter-intuitive application of culture creation relative to conversation may need a type of soil tending: muddying or crapping up, simultaneously appreciating the value of manure toward the outcome of grown food. Blending the rural with the civil has not only become trending, it has also become divorced from the inner resource and respect required to work with meteorological forces- so the “nature” performs as such, sometimes with but often instead of joined with awe and wonder psyches/souls demand for healthy function.
And so with the image, we can begin to look: at what we are looking at and how we are looking at. Then begins the practice of looking into and looking through to find where the image touches the inner part of what constitutes the self or I. This is to understand that which we imagine something to be, is not necessarily what it is, but what we make it up to be within ourselves particularly to the rapid exportation of images flooding the nervous systems of bodies across the world.
What values are being generate and exported through images? Notions about darkness and lightness can be useful to mine- as in dig into, for in dark matters, the pragmatically material values sensationalized are formed through geological forces existing whether or not humans do. Darkness can offer fear for some and comfort, introspection, and softening space for vulnerability for others. In dark spaces, such as a dark-room for developing images, the language of the image as a mind-art joins the language of a body-art through optic nerve sensitivity circuiting through the endocrine systems. Images then, immaterial and material are totalistic and incomplete, forging an asynchronicity where mind and body refrain from dualistic opposition, but circulate perspective paradigms of time through the conscious and subconscious.
Relational evidences of an image being able to be considered “just” posits a complex moral and ethical consideration. The just-ness signals not a failure of the image alone, but rather the people forgoing opportunities to further connect and consider the physicality of an image within themselves. This physicality within the personal body as a generative force relative to what is seen invites both a primitive and developed approach to reading images. By rescinding from getting ‘caught up’ by remaining down here or leveled begins a revaluation of ways of living and reading images relying upon forces some complain as absent, in truth are abundantly around: compassion, for example. Such forces remain readily available for all those who wish to choose their claim to consider the values which constitute the culture.
