This set includes works from the Walker Art Center's Event Horizon installation that are examples of hybridity in artistic practice. It first explores cultural hybridity in the work of artists who move among different cultures in their lives. The second section highlights artists who combine media in their work, resuting in material hybridity.
Each work of art is introduced by discussion questions. Users can find background information about each work by clicking the "More Info" button at the bottom of each slide. For even more information about the works in Event Horizon, refer to Event Horizon: A Study Set.
This and four other Event Horizon sets explore the installation through the lenses of five elements of contemporary art: appropriation, hybridity, performance, space, and time. Visitors can use this set to create their own thematic tour of the exhibition or generate a discussion on what hybridity means in the practices of artists working today.
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A hybrid is a combination of two or more different things. For example, a hybrid car engine combines electricity and gas as components to produce energy; a hybrid plant or animal blends characteristics of different varieties, breeds, or species to form a new type.
Cultural hybridity can refer to art that explores the blurring of boundaries between people, both social and geographic. In today's world, political and economic upheaval, coupled with the relative ease of travel across long distances, have caused people to immigrate between countries and continents at unprecedented rates. At the same time technological advances such as the Internet create links between far-flung places. Today's artists may come from multiple ethnic or geographic backgrounds, or travel back and forth from one place or another. For many artists these experiences, their cultural hybridity, becomes a theme in their work, addressing the differences between the worlds they experience or ways that they combine them to form a new view of their identity.
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What do you notice as you examine this painting in its full view? What else do you notice in the close-up detail?
What does this work remind you of?
How do you speculate it might be connected to the theme of cultural hybridity?
Udomsak Krisanamis is a Thai artist, now based in New York, who came to the United States in 1991 to pursue an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. To make paintings like this one, Krisanamis pastes thousands of newspaper strips onto a fabric support and then obsessively inks them out, leaving only selected letter forms: every "O," for example, or the enclosed forms within the letters "P" and "B." The technique grew out of Krisanamis' method of learning English: while reading the newspaper, he would cross out each word he knew, leaving the "blank spots" to be looked up.
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What do you notice as you examine this painting in its full view? What else do you notice in the close-up detail?
What does this work remind you of?
How do you speculate it might be connected to the theme of cultural hybridity?
Iranian-born artist, Siah Armajani, and Thai-born artist, Udomsak Krisanamis, both now live in the United Sates. They also both use language as a connection to their experiences moving between different cultures. Why do you think they made language a subject of their art work?
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What do you notice about this still from a video work by Chinese artist Cao Fei?
What does the place shown here remind you of?
(Cao Fei created this work in Second Life.)
Who is China Tracy? Why do you think the artist created this character?
What do you think she meant by the title of this work: "i.Mirror"?
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A hybrid is a combination of two or more different things. For example, a hybrid car engine combines electricity and gas as components to produce energy; a hybrid plant or animal blends characteristics of different varieties, breeds, or species to form a new type.
Material hybridity examines the media and techniques artists use to make art. For artists today, the choice of materials and media for creating art is wide open. Some artists continue to use traditional media such as paint, clay, or bronze, but others have selected new or unusual materials for their art, such as industrial or recycled materials, and newer technologies such as photography, video, or digital media offer artists even more ways to express themselves. Many artists working today incorporate more than one material or technique in ways that create hybrid art forms. Combinations of still image, moving image, sound, digital media, and found objects can create new hybrid art forms that are beyond what traditional artists have ever imagined.
Artists today are comfortable using whatever seems best to fully investigate and express their ideas or concepts and often move among different media and techniques to express new things in their work. One approach to understanding art today involves identifying what media and materials the artists chose and considering why they chose to work with them.
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This work is categorized as a painting. Do you agree with this? Why or why not?
What other art media or techniques are used by this artist?
What associations do you have with the materials used in this work? What do you speculate this artist wanted to express by using these materials?
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What about this artwork reminds you of a painting? How is it like a sculpture? What other art techniques can you identify?
What else do you notice?
What does this work remind you of?
In addition to mixing art techniques, how do you think this work also might refer to cutural hybridity and global issues?
What do you specualte this artist wanted us to think about as we view this work?
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This work by artist, writer, and filmmaker Paul Chan combines animated shapes that fall and rise across a "four-sided wedge of light," projected onto the floor.
How is this work like a film?
How is this work like a sculpture?
How is this work like a drawing or collage?
How does this work tell a story?
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