The Fountainhead Residency
Artist’s Statement
As a subjective approach to social ideas, my paintings and drawings are investigations into plurality, a knowing romanticism, and a personal politic. My points of departure are in existential moments, a sense of humour, and balancing bitchy suspicions with open feeling. Through the subversion of matrices from eclectic sources, in this way I contemplate how one mediates understanding and identity through imagery, inevitable clichés and stereotypes. I am learning how to paint these things out of my system and make them true for me. Asserting a sardonic but genuine hope in polysemic logic... by considering many angles simultaneously, I try to extract something meaningful (a leap of faith) from the information bomb.
I am also dealing with artistic paradoxes involved in handling political sentiment, and especially the stereotypical pickles in asserting racial and gendered perspectives. As a Chinese-Canadian raised between ‘two’ cultures in an idiosyncratic way may be why I am trying to sort out what constitutes the markers of culture/identity, and how people understand each other this way. I proudly assert myself as a person of colour, but at the same time avoid being pigeonholed as such... both by others as well as by that old trap of self-marginalisation. I think this caginess is why I approach logic within shades of grey rather than black and white, and look for alternative truthfulness in contradiction; ambiguity as a way of playing with and challenging existing constructs.
Artist’s Links
website: http://amywongwebsite.blogspot.com/
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