AfroDecor

A froStyle Magazine had the chance to be a part of New York City Spring 2013 at New York's Armory Arts Week. One hundred years since the famed 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art first challenged the American public to move beyond the purely representational picture art. The Armory show, and its satellite fairs continue to reexamine all parts of the artistic, social and human experience. Standout works from the shows include Mexican artist Farael Lozano-Hemmer's work that explores issues of influence, response and interconnection on the levels of both the familiar and the grand by filtering delayed live action audience surveillance onto a convex surface of LED's and through algorithms designed to mimic flare patterns of our natural Sun. Meleko Mokgosi's Modern Art: The Root Of African Savages commands a mural like space, spanning ten monumental screen panels which challenge the art saturated viewer with hand drawn annotations to enlarged museum notes.

“…Mexican artist Farael Lozano-Hemmer's work that explores issues of influence, response and interconnection on the levels of both the familiar and the grand…”


The work prompts the viewer to engage with the normally canonized text bluntly framing the cognitive injustice of how the techniques excavated from African cultural traditions when rendered in Europe somehow read as intelligent subjective interpretations of reality born of individual creative genius, while being considered simply imperfect attempts at replicating reality when done in native context. Meanwhile American Artist Rashaad Newsome seems to subvert the process identified by Mokgosi creating music from social sounds, with his immaculately composed yet seemingly organic Shade Compositions, a looped video exploring and re-interpreting familiar, often caricatured gestures of frustration and displeasure rooted in the black, gay and urban communities.

The blue chip art market continues to mirror the world at large, but now more than ever it seems intent on embracing diversity with unprecedented zeal by moving beyond the superficial fascination with images of exoticism to the a passionate quarry towards insights challenging to the hegemony of Western European experience. We welcome what the future as it welcomes us.