Heritage Festival: Carnival of Culture
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Heritage Festival: Carnival of Culture by Samantha Bares M.F.A. University of Colorado Boulder, 2021 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Fine Arts Department of Art & Art History 2021 i This thesis entitled: Heritage Festival: Carnival of Culture written by Samantha Bares has been approved for the Department of Art and Art History Date__________________ ________________________________ (Melanie Yazzie) ________________________________ (Matt Christie) ________________________________ (Hanna Rose Shell) 1 ABSTRACT Bares, Samantha (M.F.A. Department of Art and Art History) Heritage Festival: Carnival of Culture, Thesis directed by Professor Melanie Yazzie Within my thesis, I sought to expand an environment established within my previous work in order to explore my own identity and culture. The work I have created for this thesis is a series of eight drawings on paper, each occupying the setting of the annual Nederland Heritage Festival in my hometown of Nederland, Texas. Within the text, I address how the medium of drawing is a tool for me to take control of my anxiety and organize my thoughts. The drawings themselves are presented as vignettes that all take place within the same reality; each one draws upon imagery from my wide array of influences and interests. In this text, I address the characteristics that people attribute to categories like industry, gender, ethnicity, religion, and mental illness in order to gain a better understanding of the constructed culture that I associate with where I grew up. I seek to communicate personal narratives using the language of storytelling. Many of these pieces directly reference fairy tales and folklore as a tool to help discuss difficult topics. The text also references the young female characters found in stories from The Brothers Grimm, Leonora Carrington, and Flannery O’Connor. While using pre-existing tales to pave the way for me to include stories from my own past, I also consider the visual artists who directly influenced the work, such as Paula Rego and Natalie Frank. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 4 STYLISTIC CHOICES 9 THE OUTHOUSE QUEEN 16 MY SKIN, DONKEY SKIN 20 AFTER THE BEHEADING OF FALADA 26 TORMENT AND TENDERNESS 30 EVERYONE’S A WINNER 36 SUSPENDED IN THE VEIL 41 A TEMPLE OF THE HOLY GHOST 44 NAVIGATING FORTUNE THROUGH THE PREVIOUS GENERATION 48 CONCLUSION 49 SKETCHES 52 BIBLIOGRAPHY 60 3 INTRODUCTION My work brings in fragments of imagery from my own lived experience, the experiences of my family, dreams, and folklore to construct representational narratives. I am interested in constructing environments that contain a complex amalgamation of emotions brought on by the actions of the figures that inhabit it. Currently, I have been doing research to inform the question which guides my thesis: What is heritage? The work that I have been creating based on this question relates to my own identity as well as to what I view as a culture. The main environment I have chosen to serve as a source of imagery to build my scenes upon is that of the annual carnival-like celebration, The Nederland Heritage Festival, located in my hometown of Nederland, Texas. It is upon these fairgrounds that I will explore what makes up the heritage of where I come from. I am interested in the idea of a constructed culture, and the characteristics that people attribute to categories like industry, gender, ethnicity, religion, and mental illness. This series of drawings consist of eight pieces altogether, with five pieces sized at 8 x 11 inches, two pieces sized at 10 x 16 inches, and one piece sized at 16 x 22 inches. The idea for my thesis grew out of a smaller series I had created in 2019, titled Absorption and Assimilation, Nature and Nurture (Fig. 1). In that series, I similarly used my hometown as a setting, and the figures depicted were my family as well. The drawings were made in order to expand upon research regarding epigenetics, which is the study of inheritable changes caused by the modification of gene expression. 4 Figure 1, Samantha Bares, Absorption and Assimilation, Nature and Nurture series 1, 2, & 3, 2019, Black pencil and watercolor on paper 5 The creation process for this body of work involved reflecting on my own family's experiences and traumas, both physiologically and environmentally caused. Once completed, I desired to expand upon the world that was created in that series and to share more about where I am from. This was done by using the Nederland Heritage Festival as a microcosmic representation of the place I grew up and of the people who impacted my life, while also incorporating my interest in folklore. Folklore is defined as the traditional beliefs, customs, and stories relating to a particular place, activity, or group of people. The passing of these tales have oral origination, with examples of verbal lore including fairy tales, myths, legends, and epic poetry. I am interested in stories that have been around for a while, tales that are more or less universally known in Western society, and how they can be adapted and reinterpreted to make them more personal to both creator and consumer. The majority of the stories that I am drawn to deal with some elements of the fantastic, such as the tales of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, and even Dante Alighieri. These stories are constantly remade and retold through visual art and literature. Artists are using them to talk about a variety of themes such as sexuality, gender, feminism, power dynamics, politics, and identity in general. I am building upon the tradition of artists interpreting fairytales and folklore by creating narratives through personal and geographic mythos. The psychological study of fairy tales is largely based on interpreting symbols and archetypes in order to better understand the cultures in which the tales have originated, with some of the earliest text about the subject originating from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud was interested in fairy tales' connection to 6 dreams. The second edition of The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales describes this as, “...both fairy tales and dreams [using] symbols to express the conflicts, anxieties, and forbidden desires that had been repressed into the unconscious.”1 From Freud’s studies, his disciple Carl Jung developed his own analysis of the subject matter, described as “...the symbolic language of myths, dreams, and fairy tales [being] composed of these timeless symbolic forms, which he called archetypes.”2 By being able to better understand the background of these stories through analyzing the symbols and the archetypes, one can then compare and contrast it to their own culture. This is why artists are able to recognize that these tales have a specific origin and a purpose of exploring anxieties while still employing the subjective nature of the stories. Fairy and folk tales have an appeal to both children and adults, and subjectivity comes into play when a person analyzes which concepts they identified with in their youth in contrast to what they identify with as an adult. When creating this work, I had to recognize the psychological aspect that was present when exploring some of these existing tales and within the process of constructing my own. Part of the creative process of making this work includes a way for me to understand my own ethnic background. I am of Mexican-American and Cuban descent on my mother’s side. My father is an Anglo-Amereican, with roots in Louisiana. Because I never learned Spanish, I have always felt a kind of disconnect to the Latinx community as a whole. My grade school was also predominantly other Anglo-American students, so my maternal grandmother and her family, the Garcia’s, were the only circle of 1 Zipes, Paragraph 3 2 Zipes, Paragraph 6 7 Mexican culture that I was familiar with for a long time. Even though I took part in certain Latinx celebrations, such as having a quinceañera when I turned fifteen, there has always been a lingering feeling of unworthiness in regards to embracing this culture as a part of myself. Although this disconnect is present, I do have an extremely close relationship with my grandmother, Mary Llanes (Fig. 2). Figure 2, My grandmother and I lounging together, 2016 A year ago, I participated in a printmaking portfolio exchange in which the participants were challenged to study, recreate, illustrate and interpret a told tale, myth, or legend of the Americas. I sought the help of my grandmother because I wanted to recreate a story that was not based in Anglo society. Instead, I learned that she never really grew up with any of the folklore of Mexico. She said she did not learn much of that until she got a teaching job with other Mexican-American people. During her adolescence, she frequently went on trips between Mexico and Texas with her family. Though she has 8 never mentioned any prejudices she has faced herself, my grandmother has told me that many of her siblings struggled to try to fit into an Anglo society. Perhaps it was this battle to exist between two different worlds that led my grandmother to begin to construct the culture of her and her family that I am most familiar with. The constructed culture that I identify as my own, and the culture of my family, is based within the culture of stories. Because my grandmother did not grow up with the folklore of Mexico, I do not associate her with Mexican stories of La Llorona or Dia de los Muertos.