Wednesday, October 18, 2023

Wangechi




 How We See the world


“The selfie resonates not because it is new, but because it expresses, develops, expands, and intensifies the long history of the self-portrait.”

I had never originally considered a selfie anything other than just a random picture until we started really reading about how it connects to our past versions of selfies (self portraits) and in all honestly they can have just as much meaning and interpretation as the a portrait can have, and a lot of that comes from scene setting, angles and etc. 


“The self depicts the drama of our own daily performance of ourselves in tension with our inner emotions that may or may not be expressed as we wish.” 


A lot of what the text talks about in regards to how we see ourselves, and the emphasis on prescriptive interest because “the way we set the scene” is something that impacts the story that we are telling and there actually a lot that can be told by just thinking and questioning. 


Wangechi Mutu Dresses


“An exquisite birdlike creature, emanating an angelic glow, alights on the tree as another (the Holy Spirit?) sits on the woman’s head.”

I think a lot of the imagery Wangechi used is interesting because a lot of the individual pieces stand in for some figure, message, or symbol. The angelic glow and the holy spirit sitting on the head is one of those intense images. 


“Mutu addresses a similar issue in the large-scale Le Noble Savage (2006), which shows a grass-skirted, hairy­-armpitted woman communing with nature—birds fluttering overhead, a snake encircling her body and a snarling lion incorporated into her shoulder.”


I think emphasizing something that women get hated for all the time, bodily hair like armpits, is something so interesting. The snake around the body and snarling lion in the shoulder also add to the importance of the piece. 

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