Reflection on Anthony Bunmi Akenbola’s presentation

At the first glance of Anthony Bunmi Akenbola’s work, I was very attracted the piece which he created a painting-like collage with du-rags on a fairly large scale. He definitely found a really good way to work with du-rags, and by painting and stretching them on the canva, he was able to convey his identity and cultural background in a very unexpected way. But to be honest, I was a little bit disappointed by how he talked about it. He surely gave a lot of background information on this found object he used and the process of working with it, but to me, there was lacking something more powerful and meaningful in his explanation on the details of his work, like why some du-rags are stretched and some are more drapy. And especially when professor Katz asked what he was trying to convey by making the whole piece look like paintings, he just said that it wasn’t his intention, and he even mentioned that he was trying to make the piece aesthetically pleasing. To be honest, I don’t consider his artworks as Fine Art, his intentions are vague and the piece is only great because of the uniqueness of his found object du-rags. And let alone his other work like using an African American mask to replace the head of a doll wearing colorful dress, that just all feels too easy and shallow. I definitely admire his passion in his own culture, but his works just don’t seem to be my taste.

Since in the studio project, we are choosing a found object which talks about the topic of micro-aggression that we experienced about our body, I decide to use clocks. I always feel this pressure of aging, which i think is huge in many cultures around the world, espiecially for women. So I would like to use the pointers taking from clocks and place them on a mesh dress to create something that represents the pressure that aging brings to me and how women should feel empowered by aging than hating it.