Herberto S.

 

Artist Statement

 

  With my monolium block I carved a conflict of branding, but to ponder that conflict I had to mind map certain conflicts that interested me which lead from the casual infinite war to causes of war which ranged from territory and resource conflicts to religion. Thinking harder I found that when a certain group separates from one another it is mainly caused by how they label themselves or brand themselves with certain subjects like religion and territory they own which sometimes intertwine like that of Mecca or holy land. Religion itself being a powerful brand, I started researching world religions and their symbols so I can include them in my carving. How do I include religious symbols to reflect branding? With this question in my mind I had to show what conflict religion can cause so I referred back to the casual war subject. To my benefit I could include which regions contained nuclear weapons that are branded by flags. To symbolize war and branding and fill my print I thought to have each region with nukes and the one’s local to it to be spread on three nukes varying in direction along with its related religion to explode from the nuke. Besides representing a conflict, I mainly wanted to show a solution to the conflict and in order to do both I decided to put the branded nukes with religion exploding from it out into space as the only time those regions would do such a thing is when they united as one group without religion or certain rule. The difficulty I had with this carving was being able to fit symbolism of all the religions and the regions with harmful or nuclear weapons on one print and being able to carve small enough to show all of them with detail.

 The conflict I am trying to express in my print is how the difference of one’s branding such as being Christian or Jewish and under what region of land like being American or Mexican, mainly caused by invasion or entry of one or the other, causes conflict. I also was able to represent a solution to my conflict with the background showing space and the origin of the nukes coming from earth and exploding in space along with all the flags and religious symbols that one brands another. With the symbols gone there is nothing left to brand one another or assume a religion or right of land, leaving us to unit as one against the basic conflicts of life and death. Belief is not a life or death conflict.  I tried to emphasize branding and war together by the repetition or abundance of religious and regional symbols and so much so it seems to explode or be of less quality or unique individuality. To present the explosion I used thick double curved lines in several directions that are pushing some religious symbols away from each other and melting or thinning the religious and regional symbols with the explosion of the nuke. This is mainly represented by the disoriented Buddha, Jewish star, and flags. I used wavy lines on the Buddha to represent melting.

  Due to the size of my print and abundance of symbols for branding including all the religions and flags along with the symbolism of war, being the nukes, three nuclear silos all together in opposite directions, I had to carve really small lines to show detail and thick lines to represent an outline of the objects. Moreover the symbols, I had to carve out a circle for the moon for my space background, but to make it look more realistic I had to leave a couple disorientated circles to represent a view craters on the moon. Because the moon looks like its smiling from far away I made the craters, disorientated circles, in the shape of a smile. To my benefit, it also emphasizes the solution behalf of my conflict as the moon in personification is happy to see all the conflict of branding eradicated.  

 By mind mapping simple conflicts of war, it seemed to me that I found a major conflicting cause of war in a generalized subject of branding. Being able to draw this lead war causing subject, it was relieving in a self-expressing way to carve the conflict itself, more so to draw its solution. Even though my idea of a solution is extract and far off from reality, it was exhilarating to carve my surrealistic print as a dream to are worldly conflicts. With this being my first carving and print, I find that I could have kept my symmetry as well as shapes in form with a little more shading and textures while carving on a bigger print to pay a little more attention to detail.