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I grew up in the Southern U.S; I did not grow up in Japan and so I do not have an inherent understanding of the culture that spawned anime and manga. My first experience with Japanese popular culture was seeing the anime Akira as a teenager. I was completely captivated and simultaneously repulsed by the incredibly bizarre imagery of this film. Like much of my generation’s obsession with Star Wars, anime also made a lasting impression and left me fascinated with these people/characters and the technology behind them. Ultimately, this caused me to question our preconceived notions of reality and what our species considers to be its ideals. |
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Chris Scarborough
I grew up in the Southern U.S; I did not grow up in Japan and so I do not have an inherent understanding of the culture that spawned anime and manga. My first experience with Japanese popular culture was seeing the anime Akira as a teenager. I was completely captivated and simultaneously repulsed by the incredibly bizarre imagery of this film. Like much of my generation’s obsession with Star Wars, anime also made a lasting impression and left me fascinated with these people/characters and the technology behind them. Ultimately, this caused me to question our preconceived notions of reality and what our species considers to be its ideals.
Along with the love of Japanese comics and cartoons, I’ve also become attracted to the paintings and posters of Communist China. There’s something about these images meant to reflect a future, never-to-happen utopia that fascinates me. I think it’s the smiles that the people are wearing—as if experiencing an unbridled enthusiasm to the point of pain. It appears as if they were forced to smile non-stop all day, every day. I try to put this feeling into my drawings. They are a reflection of the human race, but there are cracks at the seams. Those smiles in the Maoist posters that were so enthusiastic have been pushed a little, just a little, farther, and now we’re unsure if we are looking at happiness or fear.
At my core, I still like a lot of things that I did as a kid. I like sci-fi, all different kinds of cartoons and explosions. But, all these things are now being filtered through an adult’s perspective and experiences. So I think a lot about how we look at imagery in its context. What’s happening inside our heads when we look at images? Often there is some preprogrammed response depending on what culture we grew up in and our own personal experiences.
What happens when you take images out of their original context and change their purpose only to apply new ones? How do you read it? Is it the same, does it impact you in a different way emotionally or intellectually?
These are very interesting questions to me—to see how a viewer will react to a familiar thing in a new context. By making these images of people that appear to be an ideal in one culture and taking them out of that culture, the original meanings may mutate and change. What once was cute now may become grotesque or vice versa. I feel compelled to create images that leave viewers on uneasy ground, unable to look away for risk that they might miss a detail that reveals everything while, ultimately, leaving them to deal with the sensation of experiencing something familiar and yet not.
