Yinka Shonibare
Yinka Shonibare MBE was born in 1962 London and grew up in Lagos, Nigeria. Shonibare’s art explores race and colonialism he uses a wide array of media including painting, sculpture, photography, film and performance when creating his work. Art history, colonialism, and social classes interest Yinka Shonibare MBE and are repetitive topics that that are represented in his art. Shonibare studied at Byam Shaw School of Art and earned a Master of Arts from Goldsmith College, London University in 1991. Shonibare has received a fellowship at Goldsmith College-2003, Barclays Young Artists Award, Serpentine Gallery in London –1992 and has been awarded the MBE (Order of the British Empire) in 2005.
In many of Shonibare’s work he uses textiles and African fabrics, however he buys the fabrics from a market in London where they are infact not authentic African fabrics. Shonibare stated, "They prove to have a crossbred cultural background quite of their own. And it’s the fallacy of that signification that I like. It’s the way I view culture — it’s an artificial construct." Shonibare then has these fabrics made into opulent Victorian dresses to be placed on mannequins, astronaut costumes, and he even stretches the fabrics to make canvases.
I am interested in Yinka Shonibare MBE’s artwork and how he works in layers. Working in layers and creating images within images is something that I have been interested in. Some of the photographs I have been taking recently for my project look like composites even though they are not, however that attracts me.
Quotes:
(in reference to forcing notions on an audience) “You have the opportunity to rethink these things, but you don’t necessarily have to. There are people who believe that the war in Iraq is absolutely right, as there are people who believe that it is absolutely wrong. There are two sides, and I think that’s what an artist has to recognize: positions are always relative.” -----Yinka Shonibare MBE
“To be an artist, you have to be a good liar. There’s no question about that. If you’re not, you can’t be a good artist. Basically, you have to know how to fabricate, how to weave tales, how to tell lies, because you’re taking your audience to a nonexistent space and telling them that it does exist. But you have to be utopian in your approach. You have to create visions that don’t actually exist yet in the world—or that may actually someday exist as a result of life following art. It’s natural for people to want to be sectarian or divisive. Different cultures want to group together, they want to stick to their own culture, but what I do is create a kind of mongrel. In reality most people’s cultures have evolved out of this mongrelization, but people don’t acknowledge that.”----Yinka Shonibare MBE
Gallery: Miami Art Museum, showed Yinka Shonibare’s “A Flying Machine for Every Man, Woman and Child.” October 31- January 18, 2009
Yinka Shonibare, Diary of A Victorian Dandy, 3.00 Hours
C-type Print; ed. of 5 48 x 72 in. 1998
Yinka Shonibare, Untitled, C-Print,
Reproduction Baroque frame, Ed 2 of 5, 48 x 36 in 1997
Yinka Shonibare, Leisure Lady with Pugs,
Life size mannequin, fibreglass dogs, dutch wax print cotton,
figure 160 x 80 x 80 cm, dogs 40 x 60 x 20 cm each
Yinka Shonibare, The Victorian Philanthropist's Parlour
Reproduction furniture, fire screen, carpet, props, Dutch wax printed cotton
approximately 260 x 488 x 530 cm
Yinka Shonibare, Spacewalk,
Commissioned by the Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia,
Screen Printed Cotton fabric, fiberglass, plywood, vinyl, plastic, steel
Works Cited
