Meg Stern

painting + text
*artist statement provided as essay,  shared as jpgs for this platform

 

My piece is heavily influenced by Guinard, Lin and Latour’s Coping with Planetary Wars. In this piece of writing, Guinard, Lin, and Latour investigate the polarization and disconnection that is happening in the world right now. They create a metaphor that people within different factions of thought are actually living on different planets: planet globalization, planet security, planet escape, and planet terrestrial. Each planet represents the way in which these people understand society, global interactions, the environment, and threats to humanity. They emphasize the importance of diplomacy in solving the disconnection between these planets, but I would take it a step further (Guinard, Lin, Latour pg. 10). My ideal solar system would provide recognition to groups while also fostering respect and intercommunication between them. However, this does not mean the redistribution of “power.” In Legacy Russell’s On #GLITCHFEMINISM and The Glitch Feminism Manifesto, Russell claims that “As we aim to ‘hack’ gender, we also need to reexamine the snap redistribution of power as a too-simplistic tool toward achieving equality” (Russell, pg. 4). Russell was talking about gender, but her argument is true for any group. Redistributing power between genders, ethnic groups, or any other type of minority is not the solution. Rather, we must emphasize recognition and respect. This is what I attempted to represent in my painting, "Recognition and Reconciliation."