Sara Milkes Espinosa

 

 

Ongoing project.

 

 

 

 

To what point is the aesthetic discipline still relevant for art making?  Most judgements we make of art depend on our aesthetic education. As pointed out by Boris Groys in Going Public, this Kantean perspective subdues art practice to art consumption, thus creating the urge for being aware of our aesthetic prejudices in order to be conscious of how the process of visual judgement , generally unconscious, works. The use of visual conventions in the pieces, such as the puffy from confectionery, the comical, the kitsch, campf and artistic mannerisms from different times, creates visual pastiches of inter cultural references that tackle the gears of our visual reasoning and remind us of our passion for creating images with our bodies, requiring both a physical effort and stimulation to our senses. 

 

Within the context of the current flow of images through the internet and social media, these references, historically attributed to visual phenomena both in traditional "high culture" and popular culture, blend in together in the nauseating mass that our visual vocabulary currently is. It is only with a sofisticated and endoctrinated visual education, generally achieved through the art academies, that we can still separate and track back this visual information into categories. Otherwise, kitsh and other visual conventions considered "refined" by mainstream culture settings are no longer awarded  different positions in visual hierarchy, managing to comply with the postmodern desire to break down cultural hierarchic systems, and making you wonder wether the pieces are very smart or plain stupid.

 

This series of pieces are visual representations of such ideas, merging the conventions of the decorative and the poetic visual language of academic settings, with symbolic representations fished in the pond of our visualpractices.