ULTIMATE TRUTH
2020
digital print
Artist Statement
This image, Ultimate Truth, combines a photo taken on the Oakland/Berkeley border, Brokeland, at 11am on September 9 of fire ravaged orange skies and quote by the late radical anthropologist and political activist David Graeber as both a warning and a way to address the crisis of survival raging in California, on our planet and around in the world. Anonymous blonds, masked by their hair, stand in front of an empty Enterprise building sprayed with the text Ugly Truth and anti-white supremacist and colonial capitalism graffiti from BLM protests. An eye peers out asking “are we awake yet?”
“The Ultimate truth of the world, is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently” David Graeber.
Bio and Websites
Johanna Poethig (born 1956) is an Oakland based visual, public and performance artist whose work includes murals, paintings, sculpture and multimedia installations. She has split her practice between public art, gallery and performance that mix idealism, satire, feminism and cultural critique. She grew up in the Philippines and has participated in Filipino-American artist collectives and Philippines based arts projects since the 1980’s. Her wide-ranging gallery and performance art investigates issues involving colonization, identity and glamour, consumerism and technology. In both public art/social practice and gallery/performance art, Poethig draws on her cross-cultural experience and social consciousness to create inclusive work offering an alternative to dominant advertising messages and American conventions of individualism and competition. In recent work Poethig explores the innate search for the mystical in a culture of media overload, mathematical patterns in nature's terrestrial and extraterrestrial life systems, alternative natural histories and futurist storytelling through spinning wheels of fortune, divination cards, sculpture, costumes and original texts.
Poethig has been commissioned to create public art projects throughout the Bay Area and California, and in Chicago, Milwaukee, Washington State, New York State, Cuba and Tbilisi, Georgia. She is lead artist for the recently unveiled $1.5 million public art project, 9 mile poem / neighborhood iconography metal work integrated into the architecture of 34 stations for East Bay’s AC Transit Bus Rapid Transit. She has exhibited internationally, and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), SF Asian Art Museum Space Bi project and Boston Center for the Arts. She is Professor Emerita at the Visual and Public Art Department, California State University, Monterey Bay.
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