 Alison Marks, who is from Tlingit tribe which is the one of the Native American tribes, displayed works containing her thoughts and experiences about her identity and surrounding world. Her works expressed her thoughts and conflicts crossing over between traditions of her identity and non-native world's culture. The artist seemed to show the compromising of her thoughts about between Native American world and the outside. Marks takes two ways ; depicting Native Americans' art and cultural codes mixed with digital technologies such as SNS or commercial advertisement methods, and tweaking the dominant modern cultures including the Western culture by using humor. Marks seems very interested in digital technologies as expecting them to do potential roles to express and preserve Native Americans cultures and endangered languages. Her works might be kind of experiments not only trans-cultural exchanging Native American culture with modern culture of the 21st century but also exploring the way of pioneering the fate of Native Americans for the future.
Tlingit's visual language is reborn to emojis of digital world.
The artist wore a mask on to a face of female in the most famous painting. The mask which is called 'Wat'sa is Native Americans’ traditional mask expressing a land otter. According to the myth of the Native Americans, this land otter take a form of a beautiful woman and lures guys. This series of works are like to upend mainstream of the world art history represented by Western art and female position in the paintings. The women who sat and looked at the male painters (we call them great artists in the history) obediently turned into the women who were trying to lure the male with their own will like a land otter. Before I entered the museum, a gentleman stopped me and started to talk about the exhibition. As showing the pictures he took before, he stopped at pictures taken these works and asked my opinions about the artist’s purpose of these works. I instantly thought that was just for fun, or.. for degrading too high valued classic masterpieces.. He said it seemed disrespect to the masterpieces and some great artists. I think his uncomfortable reaction might be what the artist intended people to feel. She seems succeed. Korean version blog.naver.com/jnlee89z/221148318785
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