Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Artist Talk # 5

I attended Fereshteh Toosi's talk about her art work. Toosi is a new media artist all though she says that new media is not the best label because later on it may no longer be new. She discussed how you cannot be a new media artist just by doing some work on the computer. There has to be a process to this type of art work and a real purpose and real thought involved for it to be successful and others should be involved in some way. Her work seems to involve some portion of society and politics. She created a video taped work called Saddam's Birthday which was related to the Iranian new year, the fifth year that we are going into the war and her personal background. it was also in relation to how there was being a movie done and someone was supposed to be cast as Saddam also if the real Saddam wanted to be seen in public it would not be him, it would be a look alike. The work was where a man and a woman dressed in bright almost clown like clothing and wore comical masks that resembled Saddam's face. They walked around outside talking to people and having them take their photo. Unfortunately she did not talk about what happened and how people reacted to it. She talked about other works show created but Saddam's Birthday was what most interested me. One thing that was impressive that she did and many other artists that have given a talk do not do is that she talked about her thought and research of the projects she worked on.

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