Posts Tagged ‘art’
An Injury to One is an Injury to All! The Art of Marela Zacarias
An Injury to One is an Injury to All! The Art of Marela Zacarias
By Christopher Hutchinson
In 2006 the oppressed masses of immigrant workers, citizens and undocumented, stepped out of the shadows and mobilized in the millions from Los Angeles to Connecticut to oppose the passing of anti-immigrant legislation.
Since then the federal government with the cooperation of state government has increased the brutal repression of immigrant workers all over the country. Work place raids and home invasions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have become common in many areas of the country. While fear and uncertainty are palpable amongst the immigrant population, so too is a culture of resistance that will not sit idly by while their friends and family members are arrested and deported.
The recent artwork of Marela Zacarias has brought the plight of immigrant workers to the gallery walls. As the economic crisis deepens it seems that most gallery exhibitions are disconnected from reality as viewers wander aimlessly amongst artwork that only passively whispers into their ear.
Zacarias’s installation art is anything but passive. It reaches out, grabs the viewer and pulls them in closer to witness the contradictions of a nation that is supposed to be at the center of the so called “free world”. Her art holds even more meaning as she has been a leader in the struggle for immigrant rights.
She says, “This series of paintings are about how the immigrant rights movement has been “frozen” by ICE and about the fear of deportation in which immigrants live their daily lives.”
She paints images in a way reminiscent of photomontage art and composes each piece by layering painted walls with painted Plexiglas utilizing a very limited palette of blue, black, red, and white.
When asked, Zacarias singled out her painting Watershed to make the connection between the workers struggles of the past and how it is inseparable from the struggle of today’s immigrant workers. In the painting she references images from a mural that was created by Mike Alewtiz along with P-9 unionists at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota while on strike in the mid 1980’s.
She said that the painting, “Is about the principle, an injury to one is an injury to all. This painting describes a moment in history when the workers at the Hormel plant in Minnesota went on strike because the plant wanted to reduce their wages. The union local P9, after a very inspiring fight, lost the strike, which gave the meat plant owner’s room to decrease pay and benefits. Eventually the plants started hiring immigrant workers who would work under horrible conditions and very little pay. Now these same workers are terrified of the raids, giving even more room to the plant owners to exploit its workers. Only by making sure that ALL workers have rights, we will be able to win better conditions in the work place.”
Images from meatpacking plants that were hardest hit by ICE raids are woven between the tears of mothers separated from their children by the menacing Gestapo like ICE agents.
Courageous stories of immigrant workers hiding from ICE agents in vats of blood to escape deportation so that they could remain with their families helped inspire this series. There is no room for wavering, once you view the paintings you must choose a side.
The art demands to know, “Are you with the masses of workers, who through their labor have built the cities and harvested the fields that create wealth for the U. S. elite or do you, take the side of the bosses who underpay and abuse their workers with long work days and threats of deportation?”
The paintings are more like vignettes taken from larger murals. Zacarias wields her art as a weapon and attacks the ruling elite of the capitalist system with a stroke of the brush. This is in sharp contrast to most art that hangs cold and isolated from the outside world.
It should come as no surprise that Zacarias is also a renowned muralist. She has painted murals with themes of social justice in many places from Washington, D.C. to Mexico City.
You can view more of her work at www.Marela.org.
Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey A critique by artist Mark Vallen
“Fairey has developed a successful career through expropriating and recontextualizing the artworks of others, which in and of itself does not make for bad art. Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein based his paintings on the world of American comic strips and advertising imagery, but one was always aware that Lichtenstein was taking his images from comic books; that was after all the point, to examine the blasé and artificial in modern American commercial culture. When Lichtenstein painted Look Mickey, a 1961 oil on canvas portrait of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, everyone was cognizant of the artist’s source material - they were in on the joke. By contrast, Fairey simply filches artworks and hopes that no one notices - the joke is on you.”
Full Article by Mark Vallen…