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red art club
Mauna Kea
2022-3
Graphite on Paper
£1600 - 20% of sales donated towards Mauna Kea Education and Awareness & O'ahu water protectors.
Mauna Kea is an artwork concerning the relationship between scientific superiority and authoritarianism. The piece was inspired by the resistance of Native Hawaiians to the decimation of the holy Volcano Mauna Kea by NASA. The artwork highlights the continuation of the favouring of western forms of knowledge at the expense of the culture and traditions of native peoples. A number of references within this piece attempt to convey this concept - most powerfully, the black cross behind the central figure on horseback. The choice to have the cross dissolve into a representation of the passage of Venus, (alluding to the Voyage of Captain Cook which first brought Hawaii into contact with Britain) signifies how western science has inherited Christianity's position as an unquestionable sign of superiority. The way in which this superiority is really achieved is meanwhile depicted in the mushroom cloud and in the figure of the policeman on horseback. Both of these references are examples of how scientific superiority is used to enforce compliance with western hegemony. Resistance is meanwhile signified in the figure of Huanani Kay-Trask giving her famous "We are
not Americans" speech.
PATRICK METCALFE
​
Patrick Metcalfe is an artist from Brighton now working and living in South London. His work is primarily concerned with socio-economic issues and interrogations of the philosophies inherent in cultural production. Strong anti-capitalist principles govern much of the inception of Patrick’s work and he hopes that new visual representation of his themes can lead to new appraisals by his audience.Patrick looks at the way in which films, memes and images normalise certain social relationships while revealing other societal contradictions. He usually works in pencil, utilising its versatility and stretching its capability to realise different tones and textures. Patrick creates what he describes as drawn collages on a scale unusual for graphite drawings, often including a variation in style, sometimes juxtaposing either modern text or a graphic image with half realised figures and abstract line and shape.Patrick studied Drawing at Camberwell College of Art and graduated in 2018. After this he undertook the Richard Ford Residency programme in Madrid, and for 3 years ran a gallery in Brighton. He is currently studying a Masters in Illustration at Kingston University, further developing visual communication skills which will help to grant his work more impact.
Follow Patrick on instagram - @patrickmetcalfe_artist
To purchase this artwork please email patrickmetcalfis@gmail.com
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