Extra Credit

Selfie: Us and Them

Perhaps one of the most interesting exhibitions I have visited in a while, "Selfie: Us and Them" captured my attention. While I will not talk about all of the pieces in the exhibition I will be very bias here and discuss the one that I felt was the strongest of them all. I leave here a note to self --------->><<<<<---- to attempt to find out the name of the artist and the name of the work. For those who attend it will not be difficult to spot as it is one of the first pieces you will see as soon as you walk into the exhibition. It is a wall full of memes of pictures or selfies or self portraits of the artist herself, well let me demonstrate to you an example of what I mean:

The image above is an exact example of the nature of this artist's work. While not exactly the same, the content of the meme is as strong as the one above. From what I understood the artist based her work off comments she asked friends and family to describe her, and then I guess the artist went and twisted some of the comments to make memes similar to the one above to express what I believe the nature of a meme. From what I remember some of the memes were about her being a single mom or her being pregnant and then something about being a whore. The case is that her work truly connected with the message she was trying to send out about memes and the cruel reality they can be. While we accept memes about Kanye, Donald Trump, and other people; reality is we don't know how much is enough and how the content can get out of hand. At least that is my interpretation of the work.

I found most of her works interesting while some of them were difficult to understand. I understand that in some cultures and I will assume based on her memes that in hers, she is treated like daddy's little girls, innocent, with the goal of making mom and dad proud. However, when she fails she becomes the black sheep of the family. The great thing about her work is that it can also be seen from an outsider perspective. For example, her being daddy's little girl does not necessarily have to be that of her family's. It could also be seen from an outsider, let's use myself as an example who has different views in cultures (not necessarily) but does not understand anything beyond. A white girl like her can easily be seen as "daddy's little girl", why? Well her race and skin color, what if the girl was Hispanic or African American, the term "daddy's little girl" would not be taken in the same approach as the white girl's. In a way it becomes a term of envy that this girl is financially well off with all the support from dad and that she can get whatever she wants by simply asking daddy.