I am honored to be the talking point of this article by artist and art writer Jamie Ballay, as he discusses my work in relationship to Hanna Hoch, Stuart Davis, Kurt Schwitters, and Georges Braque.
Samantha Marroquin pays tribute to the work of some of her heros and continues the search for social understanding in our industrialized lives.
In the work of Kurt Schwitters,....... We see artists making efforts to create a new visual language for the emerging mechanized modern world. Gone is the previous focus on nature and the agrarian lifestyle. The beginnings of mass marketing and print media had changed the nature of our visual landscape. Einstein’s Relativity and World War had changed our understanding of reality.
Assembling the cast off pieces of yesterday’s news, artists discovered a visual poetry that hadn’t been seen before. Something new, compelling and visually relevant to the “Now” emerged as a means for artistic language and social discourse. Addressing the questions of, “How does the human relate to the machine and it’s industry?” And, “How and Where, do our human souls fit into this unknown mechanized nature?”
It is the graphic mixture of visual language and human themes that makes Marroquins’ work so compelling. Her work helps us to reassemble the scraps of our yesterdays. Collectively we search for our “Now”. Seeking to find out how our society is dealing with the complexities of: Where is home? Where is safety found? and, What is real?
In many ways, the questions remain stable as the language morphs and vocabularies change. Soon to come is the commercialization of radio and television waves, the radio, the train, and the new frontiers of atomic science and warfare, bridging almost a century of time, looking for current insights into epic questions of human existence.
Please check out Jamie Ballay's own amazing artwork here.
