ARTIST STATEMENT
I use the sensibility of collage to visually imagine fertile spaces – that exist between what is and what could be – from which creative responses might emerge. Using collage’s fundamental methodology of image appropriation, decontextualization and resignification, high-fashion magazines provide the raw material for this work. These magazines are cultural icons, beautiful and inviting, yet when you peel back the layers, these images are rife with socio-cultural white-washing and environmental green-washing. Mirroring change models used in my professional practice, I appropriate and decontextualize beautiful color, rich patterns and textures from these magazines and resignify these precious bits as the “positive points of potential” used as building blocks to create imagined “sheltering spaces” in which new possibilities might incubate and eventually emerge.
As I more deeply understood the concept of sheltering spaces, I noticed around me the toll that the sheltering work is taking on those who shelter. This led to a desire to create a companion set of images – framed as Restorative Visual Retreats – that can provide a moment or two of calm and transcendence for the viewers/those who do the work of sheltering. And, beyond calm and transcendence, perhaps paired with a deep breath, a haptic response.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Fredricka Joyner is a mixed media artist residing in Indianapolis and the World. After completing an undergraduate degree in fine arts with a focus in ceramic sculpture, her creative energy turned to building a professional and academic practice focused on facilitating change in organizations, fostering more inclusive and diverse communities and the development of effective leaders. The connection to her professional focus on social imbalances, inequities and environmental issues has become a core and integrative part of Fredricka’s artistic voice.
Fredricka’s experience growing up in the Southwest has shaped a color palette – that is at the same time colorful and earthy – and her fascination with materiality. She builds mixed media images using fragments of dismantled American high fashion magazines, manipulated personal photographs, thematic cartography, and other ephemera marking personal and cultural significance. In the face of increasing polarization of our communities and social systems and ongoing environmental deterioration, the question Joyner explores in her work is: How do we dismantle what is not working, and using the relevant components, find the hope and healing to build something new that we haven’t yet imagined?
© Fredricka Joyner