Medium Specificity

Artist Statement

     Everybody is different. Or at least everybody claims to be different. And while everyone claims to be different from everyone else, everyone else is claiming that everyone is the same. Hence, we get stereotypes that seemingly limit our freedom to express and be who we want to be.

     In class we read over McCloud’s comic piece Show and Tell. In his medium, he demonstrated how comics, pictures and words, could effectively tell a story. In my own piece I did something similar. I used several photographs put together to create a work of art that explores a certain subject. Just as McCloud used in one portion of his piece, I too demonstrated how words and images can work together to have the audience fill in some of the blanks for themselves. An example of this in my piece is when I shade the character black and then write the word “sports” above his head. It’s obvious that there is a connection between the image and the word. It is highlighting the stereotype that all black people are good at and love sports. By doing this, I was able to link words and pictures together, and convey a specific message.

     The Chicago School of Media Theory also explored the importance of medium specificity and said the following, “Eliot argues that a writer never starts on a blank page, and by the same token a painter never begins with a blank canvas, and the same follows for all media. In order for a medium to have characteristic qualities it must be grounded in a tradition that has established these as intrinsic properties.” In my video you see that I do start with a blank page, but I did not just start drawing with a blank mind. Everything we do is just the product of everything that has happened before us, and my piece helps us to see that. There are plenty of ideas and words that have been said pertaining to man, and I attempted to capture that by saying that all of these stereotypes are influencing people to become what others expect them to be. In a sense, you could say that the lives of people are an example of medium specificity themselves.

     At the conclusion, of my piece, I drew a box around everything that had been written and put of the word “Freedom???” There is a trite phrase that people like to use when saying they have a different way of thinking. That is the phrase to “think outside the box.” While people believe that’s what they are doing, they are in fact becoming a product of what the people around them expect them to be. That is why I pose the question of freedom. Is it freedom if we just become what everyone thought of us to be? That is the question we have to answer for ourselves.