There is an African proverb that goes, “A stranger has big eyes but sees nothing.” When arriving in Liberia for the first time, there was a glut of information that our Western conceptual framework was not equipped to filter.  Everything we saw fly by the window of the Land Cruiser on the way to the campus just blended together.  We were clearly spectators and not participants.  But as we settled in to our home, which was similar to our past experience with the electricity, running water and nice furnishings, we had these foreign invaders creep in every night that were just small enough that we could process them.  We’ve got plenty of bugs in the States, but these were bugs from the other side of the world that we’d never seen before.  They were the first part of Liberia that we began to know and understand; they started to become part of our own cultural context in flux, and that is what this suite is about: cultural interaction.

I put the Rhinoceros beetle painting up in front of my English class as an exercise in original thinking and interpretation.  They had to write for half an hour describing and interpreting. Cumulatively, they really solidified for me what I was trying to communicate.  There are three basic parts:  1) One student noticed that the ground is cloth from the local market here.  2) Most of the students described the beetle in the terms of their experience with it.  They said it lives in palm trees, and will fly into the village at night when a light is on.  One tribe in Liberia eats the meaty part under the shell and wings in a palm nut gravy over rice.  3) And the third observation was that the white background isolated the bug and drew your attention only to it.  I had to explain that the white background is kind of a ubiquitous default mode of presentation in the West; from scientific documentation, to commercials, to clothing catalogs, to children’s “name the thing” books, the white background is everywhere in the States.  In the Liberian village, where your everyday experience doesn’t have any media, considering a thing in itself, outside of its context, is a novelty.  Where do you get a white background if most of what you have comes from what comes from the ground around you?  So, putting that all together, on a lower level this suite is about our experience coming to Liberia.  It has a very clearly Liberian thing (these bugs that are so strange to us), presented in a very Western mode of representation (isolated and enlarged on a white background), but still within an African context (the African lapa).  It is the story of us getting acclimated to our new context.  But on a higher level, I don’t want it to just be about our experience, I want it to illustrate the expanding of a Western consciousness to encompass contexts that are completely foreign.  In the West we are rich and comfortable, and becoming familiar with most of the rest of the world gives us a more realistic perspective on life.

That is essentially what this suite is about.  But there is one more important component.  We are Christian, and the Christian ethic carries with it a sweet burden to care for people.  It is an inevitable movement that results from realizing the care that God showed for us in Jesus.  When our conciousness is expanded to see need somewhere, it is not only our duty, but it should be our natural impulse to assist with that need.

I got some great feedback from Ray Padron, a sculptor friend of mine.  If you are interested in reading more about my current suite, I encourage you to read the excerpt from his critique that follows:

I think the choice of background is a whole concept into itself and definitely my favorite part of the painting. The juxtaposition reminds me of the work of Yinka Shonibare who makes colonial clothing out of african patterns that are actually dyed and printed in India. Having the middle of local patterned cloth whited out definitely brings up in
my mind the idea of colonization and western expansion, something that is always present when talking about the idea of missionary work. So much cultural identity has been destroyed and lost through this vehicle, which is something I have always struggled with in thinking about mission work and the church as a whole, even though the modern approach has changed so much. Like you said, it’s about you seeing
both ways of viewing the world and this culture and about how they interact. That is obviously very different from earlier notions about “lesser heathen cultures”. But I think with that background and your role as both a missionary and the artist, I think that conversation is unavoidable. Almost so much so, that in order to make work about your experience there, I would think you would have to address it.

I think this is an amazing source for work, and it seems to me that the bugs are just one way to talk about it. Your place there is a very complex and complicated one, full of different perspectives and I’m sure your own view of it is changing and developing every day. Maybe I am wrong, but it seems to me that the paintings contain a dialogue or search for what that place is exactly and your own absorption of your environment as you grapple with your place in it, hence the white empty space and patterned sections and using something like bugs that contain just one small example of the difference in views.

I think it is very important to consider the relationship to art history as well. I took a class this year called “imagining otherness in the visual cultures of America” and it was an art history class about interactions between western culture and “the other” all throughout history. If you are interested I could send you some of the readings I had. It has the best class I have ever taken in my life and completely changed my outlook on the art world and taking inspiration from objects of other cultures (something I do a lot). It really got to the heart of how people interact and how they represent this world and other peoples. Ever since people have traveled the globe, people have been making art about the interaction between their frame of mind and the “other”. Much of it is full of racism and prejudice and facilitated the agenda of the west and helped construct much of the stereotypes we have today of native peoples. Writings and etchings sent back to England, France and Spain of South Americans basically gave them the notion that it was an act of moral righteousness that they go to this land and take it from the clutches of an evil heathen race. Other images of the exotic were sent back to allure and entertain. Then you have a whole era of painters and writers who saw these places as a way of escaping the woes of modernism, looking to be free of the burden of western culture and painted the ephemera of these exotic cultures from a western perspective. These paintings mostly mirrored their own escapist fantasy and once again had a very derogatory way of showing the other.

I think it is a little scary to be in the position you are in and make art about your experience, just because the history of that position is one under heavy scrutiny and criticism. I think your work has an openness that gives it something more than just an exotic vibe or a stereotypical view, but I think it would be super important to be aware of that relationship and be ready to talk about why your work is not just some sort of exploitation. Anyways, I know maybe all this is a lot but it is something that has been on my mind for awhile now and if I am way off base in some of my assumptions, forgive me. Either way, something to think about.