Artifacts: Haida Totem Pole

Artifacts: Haida Totem Pole (2011)
Acrylic on canvas, 30" x 30"

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the first piece of my Artifacts series. The series was sort of born out of necessity-- my experiments with hybrid painting excite me greatly, but the printing process is quite expensive. I quickly realized that, in order to fill out my portfolio for submission as a technology-themed gallery show, I would still need to develop some fully traditional projects to save time and money.

This series developed out of an observation I made as I was reading an article about a photographer who intentionally uses .jpeg compression in his images to establish a postmodern aesthetic. The word "artifact", as it pertains to my series, has a double meaning. The first meaning is the obvious one, the one that usually comes to our minds-- an object which is a relic of an older culture, usually placed behind a glass case at some museum. The second meaning refers to the terminology of digital photography-- basically, any visual anomaly that distorts the clarity of a digital photograph after it has undergone compression (as when being saved as a .jpeg). You've seen these, I'm sure. They're the reason bad quality .jpegs are blurry, blocky, and off-color in spots. This series explores the relationship between the two definitions.

We in the Western world have developed an affinity for museums and galleries. We dig up and preserve old objects, and we put them in safe, climate-controlled environments, behind glass and velvet ropes. For us, it is a valuable educational experience. But many of those objects were never envisioned as museum pieces. They lose their intrinsic utilitarian value the moment they go into a museum's collection; a bowl ceases to be used as a bowl, and a hat will never be used as a hat again. Many of these items belonged to real people, and were items cherished for sentimental value-- but not anymore. There seems to be a detachment in museums, where we can only envision other cultures through glass cases, and never as real phenomena. So I wondered-- what would future generations do with our old .jpeg photos, something that is so common in our culture that we take it for granted? Would those artifact-laden, blurry, pixelated pictures ever be seen as having anthropological significance? And moreover-- how will our successors interpret the most intimately personal of our photographs? Will it be with the sterility with which we view our predecessors?

I was fortunate enough to have an amazing resource for museum artifacts right in my backyard: the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, which has an enormous collection of items from cultures all over the world. I visited and took my camera, then used the photos I took as reference for my paintings. I was going for a painting style somewhat reminiscent of the effects of digital degradation, so after the underpainting was done, I taped off blocks and did intentionally distorted overpainting. It's a time consuming process, but I'm quite pleased with the results.

The first painting, of course, is a totem pole carved by the Haida, one of the First Nations tribes that is native to the Vancouver area. The MoA has several of these, both inside and out.