Wendy Red Star, Kambui Olujimi and Myths

Wendy Red Star created a timeline that curved around a huge room, representing the previous, current, and future generation of her family. In another room, Kambui Olujimi adapted his novel, Wayward North, into a short film which didn’t exactly spoon-feed its audience. Alongside that, he’d made twelve constellation pieces [Skywriters & Constellations] that portrayed various things from gods to inanimate objects.

Wendy Red Star’s timeline allowed her to construct and show off her identity with a ton of pictures and notes beside those pictures that explained their relevance to her life overall. This type of blunter explaining, I actually like, because otherwise everything just seems to be random pictures since we don’t know these people. Alongside the timeline, she has photos of homes in her culture, as well as a map that shows where all sorts of people among her culture are from. Even besides that, she has photos of various men and women (unfortunately I’m not sure what her relationship with them is) where she highlights their clothing in red marker and writes notes about various parts of their outfits and names and sometimes their lives beside them.

She actually doesn’t seem to pull much from mythology, unlike Olujimi who clearly didn’t let his work be shackled to reality. Red Star has so much culture to pull from without diving into Native American mythos, that she stuck to the real world and left it at that. Olujimi’s work was more ‘out there’ and from the constellation pieces, it’s clear that he means to make his art as grand as possible at least in theme.

            I don’t think there are many mythic elements that’ll be added to my self-portrait project. Although I suppose myths have a connection to what I have in mind, in the sense that I’ll likely be using symbolism to explain things about myself if possible. Much like myths tend to not really outright say things, even if they can be heavy-handed, I’d like to trust my audience like Olujimi does.

            My own project might connect to the work in the museum in that my work and Wendy Red Star’s works are both expressions of self whether it’s us as individual people, or us as in the culture we’re from and the things that we’ve encountered in our lives. I’m not sure how much my work has in common with Olujimi’s, really, as his art didn’t seem to be much of an expression of self, per se, but rather the story of many other people that he created. It’s possible that his characters are all representatives for parts of his own personality and experiences, but all we can do is assume, unlike with Red Star where she plainly tells the audience why she’s showing certain things.