Poetics of Identity...

                                           Poetics of Identity...Jungha Park: Lithograph 2017

Poetics of Identity

small collisions of self-narrative and historical consciousness

Michelle Wild,  Robyn Pell,  Jungha Park,  Emmalyn Hawthorne

In its fundamental form poetic logic provides a strategy for formulating a cradle of understanding of everyday experience that engages associations between the familiar and what often exists within the unfamiliar margins of the everyday. For the individual the poetic response becomes a convergence of the private and the public that begins with an inner grasping of the external world and where in unassuming ways has the capacity to assimilate the individual into the collective experience of society. With the ever-growing rise of right wing conservative voices that bare witness to an intellect immersed in mockery and contradiction and where the emphasis is more aligned with destruction than creative acts, one can often feel a sense of personal estrangement in identifying with a shared cultural consciousness. Within such fractious states the poetic voice; the poetic image becomes evermore decisive and resolute.

The formation of identity at both a societal or personal level is an undertaking that initiates a process of recognizing what it is that makes us unique in the world. An essential part of formulating a sense of personal identity is gained through a reciprocating dialogue between self and the objects within the immediate spaces we occupy. The montage of poetic reasoning and manifestations of personal/cultural identity offers a mode of perception that formulates an acceptance of our unique experience of the world and acknowledges the personal and societal shift made available through the multitude of imagined interpretations of everyday experience.

In Poetics of Identity the mediation between everyday objects and their re-presentation of articulations of identity provides a significant platform for each of the exhibiting student/artists. Whether embodied within the form of a photographic etching, a remnant artefact, an allegorical lithograph or cast off onion-skin as collage, this exhibition windows a discourse of identity sustained by poetic logic that spurns any one fixed reading and chances to embrace an ensemble of open interpretations where the poetic response holds sway.

Poetics of Identity: Griffith University Queensland College of Art: Project Gallery; March13-25th. 2017

Opening event: Friday 17 March from 6pm.