Q'eros, Peru

 

This is the eleventh painting in the Top 100 2021 series, and perhaps the most striking thus far. The painting captures the concepts I set out for the series; double portraits; a juxtaposition of the recorder and the one recorded. Quite often the recorder, so was my preconceived notion, is a Western white middle aged man and the one recorded a female indigenous singer. This particular coupling is actually the first one, of eleven, when this is preconceived notion turned out to be true. While the juxtapositions, in no uncertain terms, comment on the colonial attitude of the object versus subject history of western culture, I make a point of it to treat both object and subject with utmost respect. I am equally in awe of the anthropologists and ethnomusicologists who recorded indigenous cultures, and of the musicians who were recorded, and, after all, provided the music that makes up the Top 100 2021. For myself, as the artist, I'm yet one step further removed, I am the sub-subject in the equation. This painting features Andrea Quispe Chura, a Q'ero woman who was photographed by the American musician, photographer, and musicolgist John Cohen in 1977, and Cohen himself. Both images come from the book: There is No Eye: John Cohen Photographs. The song the painting illustrates was also recorded by Cohen in 1977 in Peru. The song was performed by two Q'eros women, just not (likely) the woman depicted in the painting, and in Cohen's photograph. There is No Eye starts with an anecdote from Cohen's work that really tells a lot about the significance of the work Cohen (and the 99 others in the series) are engaged in and my own infatuation with it all: "On the Voyager space craft is a recording of a young girl singing an Andean huayno. She singing in Quechua, and her song is included as a sample of the sounds of our planet." With these paintings I've come to realize how the world of academia is really a world of respect, equality, and non-bias compared to the world we experience every day. I'm pleased to have been invited to show these works, in the Spring of 2022, in a city, Columbus, Ohio, that was my own city for 17 years until 2011.