The Artist's Statement or:
How You Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate My Art
Cut. Paste. Reassemble. My work is an amalgamation of my daily life – my subjects range from strategy board games to the deconstruction (and reconstruction) of idioms, from feminist theory to internet memes, from imaginary life forms to modern politics. I synthesize my daily life and piece the parts together to express these cultural collages through my paintings and prints.
After studying Asian American studies and feminism at UC Berkeley, I have gained a greater understanding about the power of linguistics and the way that society as a whole perceives, creates, and understands hierarchies. Whether it be the hierarchy of painting styles, subject matter, language, race, gender, or the hierarchy of image versus text, I want to deconstruct these socialized norms and create a cognitive dissonance by utilizing creative combinations and reordering of these individual elements within each hierarchy.
I am interested in the nature of human beings. In my work I seek to instill an emotion, a provocation, a reaction. In the gleaming hyper-stimulated world we live in, whether it be for good or for ill, I wish to spark a visceral reaction to my work.
-Rick Kitagawa
January 1, 2010