Last week, on April 13th, I took part in a student-led discussion about the upcoming Boyden Gallery exhibit, Human Migration. A little back-story: my friend, Cassie, invited me to join the panel as a representative for all History majors. Cassie and her classmates, as part of their museum studies course “Connecting Art to Our Community”, wanted to host and record a student-led, cross-disciplinary discussion modeled after the faculty cross-disciplinary panel that opened the recent exhibit, Placing Color. At the moment, they’re in the process of turning our discussion into an article for publication.So, last week, with a camera rolling, I sat down with a group of Art / Art History / Environmental Studies / and Anthropology majors to discuss how the work of Amze Emmons and Asma Ahmed Shikoh related to our collective fields, as well as our individual relationship to art. (If you’d like to look at some of these artists’ work – and you should- head to http://www.amzeemmons.com/amzeemmons.com/Work/Pages/Refugee_Architecture.html and http://www.asmashikoh.com).
Our observations and dialogue wandered far and wide, but the work of Emmons, in particular, seems to relate well to our photo book class. Recently, Emmons has begun capturing images from large newspapers (the New York Times, the Post, etc.) and then re-drawing them, using bright colors and pseudo-cel-shading to transform images of refugee camps and slums into something Candyland landscapes. In so doing, he calls attention to the aesthetic qualities that lie dormant inside all news-photos. I say “dormant” because, in general, the photographs we scan over in newspapers are treated as “fact.” We don’t question their validity; instead, we rely on them to illustrate the words that accompany them. By remaking these images, Emmons highlights all of the formal elements –the use of line, of color, or spatial logic- that viewer unconsciously use to make sense images. In a word, by remaking these images, Emmons breaks down the idea that photographs denote fact, showing us what we often fail to see.
But Emmons’s work does not stop with formal elements. As he remakes these news-images, he also edits out the people who once filled the frame. His color-rich drawings depict empty tee-pees and laptops glowing in deserted rooms. By removing the people from these photos, Emmons reminds his viewers that, even as they overlook the formal qualities inside every news-photo, they also overlook the real people who inhabit each photo. Too often, we treat the men, women, and children who inhabit photographs of refugee camps as little more than illustrations. By removing them from the frame, Emmons somehow makes the refugees more noticeable than they were before.
Pure magic.
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