Buddy Wakefield came to visit last semester. I heard that he was a slam poet and went to see him, not because I expected anything great or had done research on him or needed to attend a reading for credit, but because I was bored. and I knew that several of my friends were going to be there. and I love slam poetry. Half way through his third poem (they ran together like spilled ink), I realized I was completely and utterly mesmerized. Buddy has a way of stringing words together and making them more beautiful then anything I have ever read or listened to. His passion for his work, his life experiences, the people he meets and interacts with and loves, are all within his poems, wrapped up tight and buried within flowery or acerbic words that create juxtaposition and contrast and make the listener/reader think about the relationship between the letters, between the words, between themselves and their peers and the world.
Poetry can have the power to rearrange ones' mind, however briefly. Any kind of art has the potential to change a person or affect them in some kind of way. Some artists have more of an impact then others and I have found that this is mostly to do with personal preference. Buddy Wakefield, Wassily Kandinsky and Richard Avedon are some of my favorites. Their work has impacted me in subtle and significant ways.
Specifically talking about Buddy Wakefield, however, is another story. His talent for stringing together the minuscule and seemingly unimportant details and minutia of life into a complex, impactful story is incredible. I wish to convey this sort of skill in my photographs and mixed media work. I want to document the details of life in ways that make them weird or unknown, that cause the viewer to reevaluate what they are seeing and actually think about their relationship to the object/objects. So many of life's details we take for granted. There are so many things that we see on a regular basis but because it is within the context of a greater whole, we do not register it as something unique. Wakefield's work puts a magnifying glass on the uncomfortable parts of life, making them beautiful and unique and acceptable. I want to do the same thing. I want to work my photographs and work from merely macro images to images or works of things that are initially beautiful but whose content changes when the context is realized.
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