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Rico Gatson explains some of his work to teens at an Artist+Youth Dialogue.
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Rico Gatson
On Friday, February 18th, Youth Insights students led the first Artist+Youth Dialogue of the year with contemporary artist Rico Gatson. This was the culminating event of a study of his work which included a curatorial walk-through, led by head Curator Shamim Momim, of the "Fight or Flight" exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria featuring Gatson's work. Youth Insights also visited his studio where YI kids were invited to observe his process. In the exhibition Mr. Gatson presented 3 flat screen video monitors mounted on a wood paneled wall. The monitors showed a continuously looping video depicting fast-paced, heavily sampled images dealing with issues of race, politics, war, and popular culture. On the wood paneled wall was the faintest etching of a confederate flag, adding to the dynamics of this multi-layered work of art.
Rico Gatson was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1966 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New Nork. He received his BA from Bethel College in Studio Art and his Master of Fine Art from Yale University. He is an acclaimed artist who has been exhibited throughout the world. However, on this day he sat down for an interview with Youth Insights students. Here are some of their thoughts.
Ozzy
On Friday, February 18th, members of The Whitney Museum's Youth Insights program and the public were able to ask questions to the artist Rico Gatson in the first Artist + Youth Dialogue of the year. Rico, whose work was featured in the Altria gallery, had many messages that really reflected today's issues. He conveyed his love for mixed media in this exhibition. His work consisted of a series of televisions that distorted images of various kinds. He used many known figures including Booby Seal and Foxy Brown. His work titled Malicious Indifference touched on the ignorance of people. It outlined how many people are aware of the many issues that are prevalent in today's society but choose to ignore them, and, while not doing it purposely, are acting maliciously. Rico used an interesting technique in various works, including past ones. He distorts the images and refracts the name, sort of like a kaleidoscope. This interesting technique engages the viewer with vibrancy of colors and images. While the dialogue at times became redundant and information was limited the artist did show his process, constantly repeating it as intuitive.
Dalah
Rico Gatson is an awesome sculptor, video maker and multimedia artist who uses lots of techniques to explore the cliches of cinema. He takes clips or scenes of movies and rearrange them in his videos. His work captures lots of emotions, feelings, and meanings. Lots of his videos he made have moral lessons and a messages to them. His message is to stop violence, and he shows clips or scenes of fights, weapon possession and it's dangerous consequences. He shows fear in scenes where people are running or in situations where some one is hurt. The irony of this is he is trying to tell us or show us that violence is not the answer; that it's the problem in society. He uses sound and music to capture the viewer attention. He uses lots of color to play with the characters in the videos emotions. He is very creative, and he tries to explore all kind of methods in art to capture the viewer's eye and create something phenomenal. I must say he has been successful so far, but what will he create next? Rico Gatson uses sound in his work to bring lots of feelings and emotions to his work, where the sound help create a story in his work. Rico Gatson has lots of knowledge in art, but I must say that he seems very shy and didn't really talk about his work and left it to the viewer to decide on a judgment and interpretation.
Hemamset
Our dialogue with Rico Gatson was enlightening, to say the least. I happen to like Rico Gatson's personality, so it was fun to get to know him. I also thought that the type of artwork he does is interesting, especially the selections from movies that he used, such as the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, when there are tons of other violent gun movies out there, for example The Matrix and Saving Private Ryan. So that much interested me greatly. However, Rico Gatson didn't appear to have the greatest skills as a speaker, and it provided a few problems for us. The word used most in the English language is "the", obviously with good reason. But in the Rico Gatson dictionary, the two most used words are "you know." He didn't present himself well, you know? I mean... well you know what I mean. You know? Of course, this kind of dialogue can wear on the nerves quite quickly. I'm sure a creative mind like his had so much to say on the inside, but I just wanted to yell "Spit it out already, man!" Needless to say, the audience responded to these inadequate responses, as well as the fact that he seemed to use words but avoid answering the question directly in many cases.
Another thing that served to bring about my growing headache was the time situation. We had an hour to do this, and it was logistically structured in the wrong way. We took comments in the middle, rather than in the end, and the audience raised a lot of interesting but time-consuming questions. This could have been avoided if we had left the questions until the end, in which case we could respectfully end the question-asking and pull it out on time. As it was, it is literally a miracle that we only went 20 minutes over time, but my co-workers and I were less than satisfied that we weren't able to get all of our dialogue on the table.
Now for a few words of advice: no artist is perfect. Some are nervous, just like us. Some don't speak well, just like us. While this is pretty obvious to us and is probably making you say, "Duh Hemz" right now, when the situation arises we tend to make our subjects larger than life, because we feel we need to. Expect to have a great dialogue, but don't expect them to be a perfect speaker, or even necessarily a good speaker. The only thing you can do is to work around it. Secondly, like the saying of mice and men, the best laid plans are likely to fail in some way. I can only hope that a large and important part won't fail if you run a dialogue, but make sure you have a backup and don't rush in blindly. Make sure you're versatile, and can bounce back from a shocking turn of events. And remember, no matter what, try to have fun!
©2005 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York
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