Robin North
He is from Richmond, Texas
He works in photography and printmaking, collage, and Mixed Media (Including Cyanotype prints)
His work explores colonialism, the legacy of slavery, and the African diaspora in the American south. He explores how Image making as a process has been used against black people throughout history to promote ideas of racial inferiority and how they still do through the current day lens of class.
He chooses to subvert these commonly promoted ideas by subverting commonly employed processes of image making. So instead of using a lot of modern, digital tools he returns to printmaking and cyanotypes, inverting the notion of technological progress in the image and choosing to reclaim these earlier told which are responsible for laying the groundwork for a lot of racist ideas in mass media.
When he talks about challenging historical ideas I think this is about the ideas promoted by American culture, and spurred to new heights by mass media like photography about racial inferiority. From the creation of the first modern motion picture film has been an art form which has been inherently tied to race. Edward Muybridge's man on a horse presents us with a black jockey riding a horse through a field, to this day we know the name of the horse and not the man. North is trying to use these same mediums, to reclaim them for himself as a black man to tell his own stories.
Decolonized Aesthetics
That black people cannot be regal
Precious Artifacts
That there is no black history
H-Town Hurting
That there is no peaceful protest
The portrait is an inherently colonial tool, and I like the way he chooses to invert it in Decolonized Aesthetics, by putting black people in the portrait wearing traditional African clothing.
He is from Richmond, Texas
He works in photography and printmaking, collage, and Mixed Media (Including Cyanotype prints)
His work explores colonialism, the legacy of slavery, and the African diaspora in the American south. He explores how Image making as a process has been used against black people throughout history to promote ideas of racial inferiority and how they still do through the current day lens of class.
He chooses to subvert these commonly promoted ideas by subverting commonly employed processes of image making. So instead of using a lot of modern, digital tools he returns to printmaking and cyanotypes, inverting the notion of technological progress in the image and choosing to reclaim these earlier told which are responsible for laying the groundwork for a lot of racist ideas in mass media.
When he talks about challenging historical ideas I think this is about the ideas promoted by American culture, and spurred to new heights by mass media like photography about racial inferiority. From the creation of the first modern motion picture film has been an art form which has been inherently tied to race. Edward Muybridge's man on a horse presents us with a black jockey riding a horse through a field, to this day we know the name of the horse and not the man. North is trying to use these same mediums, to reclaim them for himself as a black man to tell his own stories.
Decolonized Aesthetics
That black people cannot be regal
Precious Artifacts
That there is no black history
H-Town Hurting
That there is no peaceful protest
The portrait is an inherently colonial tool, and I like the way he chooses to invert it in Decolonized Aesthetics, by putting black people in the portrait wearing traditional African clothing.