Big Idea Book Pages 3 and 4

First of all, let me preclude this entry by mentioning that I have made some changes to the actual form of my book.  I wanted to do something more sculptural which relates to the things I'm exploring in my own work.  So the work I post today may seem a little unfinished since it's not worked into the sculpture yet.  Hopefully you all can bear with me and with any luck the finished product will come across the way I want it to.

In choosing an artist to respond to I had a difficult time finding someone who worked with the idea of superstition explicitly, but often it was tangentially related to their commentary on ritual, unsubstantiated beliefs, or in the case of Kara Walker, the way that misunderstanding, stereotypes, and fears can transform into mythologies and superstitions. Walker's work explores power struggles, misconceptions, and fears surrounding black and white relationships in the American South.  In her work she relies heavily on the use of the old fashioned silhouette, presented in stark black and white contrast which parallels the subject matter (black and white relationships/struggles), the idea of caricature, rather than true likeness, and, as I see it, two dimensional, black and white modes of thinking.

For the pictorial portion of the next two pages, I have chosen to create the silhouette of a hand out of fortune cookie predictions which will be decoupaged to the outside of the magic 8 ball like sphere that is my book.  I chose a hand for two symbolic reasons.  One is that it calls to mind palm readers and other types of fortune tellers, but the other is that our hands are our instruments for manipulation.  Hands are active, expressive, and help us to explore, understand, and shape our reality.  Interestingly enough, as I was creating this piece, opening oodles of fortune cookies, I found myself picking and choosing the predictions and forwarnings which I sort of wanted to believe in, based on my own fears and desires.  I began to think about how fear and desire, especially when combined with misinformation, or lack of information, like the lack of information we see when looking at a silhouette, can fertilize superstitious attitudes or tendencies.

The text that I wish to pair with this image is simply "Cognite Tute", Latin for "think for yourself".  Only when we do that can we can we take control of our destiny and overcome prejudices.