2015 Sally Becker Grinspan Award for Artistic Achievement

Abstract

"Drowning" is an installation created by Jingwen Luo in the spring of 2015. It installation is comprised of facemasks, dirt and thread. The artist's description of the piece reads: "Facemask has become a necessity in people’s daily life in China. It protects people from dirt and germs and also isolate them from close interaction with other people and the surrounding environment. But it is also in that enclosed quarantine space that people are aware of their breath, its temperature and humidity. By sewing facemasks together, I want to emphasize a sense of collectivity and uniformity that is inherent in the material itself. Inspired by the composition and ambiguous implication of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, I juxtapose the facemasks with dirt (something that facemask is designed to protect against from and also something that human beings are said to be made from in many creation stories) to invoke some interesting conversations between these two contradictory objects." The artist's statement reads: "My work is a conversation between natural world and human. I seek analogies between them and raise questions of where human stands in relation to the earth. Their similarities and contrasts. Their struggles and combats. Heavily engaged with bodily sensation and sense of time, the installations ask for the audiences’ contextual response and reflection."