Seung Hee Kim
In a world where the importance of a critical event is diluted by not only the number of events we are informed of, but also the frequency at which we receive information regarding events, our capability to empathize is inhibited. The main victim of the speedily disseminated information is the millennial generation, which I am part of. In my work I draw upon my experience with the media and it’s ways of inundating our daily lives, hence causing people to grow indifferent towards current issues.
Human eyes are naturally drawn to texts because our brains are trained to recognize and linguistically understand them. I cut out texts from newspaper and arranged them in a specific way so that the words, when read together almost seem to make sense, but ultimately mean nothing. Initial intrigue followed by the realization of ultimately meaningless text reflects my own experience. When I read or hear about a current issue, I am intrigued, but by the end of the day, the issue does not mean much. Today’s headlines will soon be irrelevant and we have to keep moving along. I implied the stark reality of having to quickly move on from today’s events with the rough texture of the black acrylic paint.
Controversial events tend to bring about two opposing ideas. At the immediate moment we are exposed to an event through the media, we try to take a side. The event shows that something, someone, somehow is “good” or “bad”. However, these events are not so “black and white” as we want them to be. People are inherently multidimensional, but the media finds a way to make these individuals so flat and “black and white”. I pasted newspaper cutouts of people and added graph-like lines to show how the media attempts to put people into certain categories for the convenience of their report.