Contemporry artist Fatimah Tuggar - Essay Example

These images happened to be digitally made and reveal their constructed nature to question today's commercial system of representation and how cultural image is formed. [Fortin, 2001] Tuggar's sculptures include real images, primarily domestic ones, which include a leather cushion setting arrangement, a make-up holder, a Calabash bowl, a ceiling fan, an old-fashioned radio, writing tables and dowery plates. Thus, they are pulled into three dimensions. Fatimah manipulates these objects which continue to function but in a re-informed social content and personal history.

Fatimah Tuggar digitally combines photographs of her native Nigeria with images of the West (taken from fashion magazines, mail-order catalogues), thus, creating artworks which raise questions of self-identity and cultural differences. Her works reflect her place in both American and African society. Instead of creating simple binary oppositions, she looks closely at cultural nuances; she looks between the cultural products and structures to better understand how media technology influences and affects the daily lives of people.

She says, that she focuses 'on the internal relationships of the individuals within the image, tempered by the surrounding power structures'. [Kino, 2001]Sylvie Fortin, the investigator of Fatimah's creations, stays that her digital montages combine sections of images that are garnered from two distinct sources. A first one is considered to be shot in the artist's travels in Northern Nigeria and elsewhere - they betray varying degrees of intimacy and immediacy. The second, boundless virtual bank of found images includes the vast script of Western print and electronic mass media of the last 70 years.

That is cinema, travel and fashion and lifestyle magazines, television, advertising and the web. In most cases, the work's conceptualization is launched by the artist's photographs, where the retrieval of a public image follows, thus, creating the intersection of two image systems on its surface. [Fortin, 2001]Fatimah Tuggar's work, or her digital imaging, is a tool, a method, and a metaphor for genetic manipulation; it's also a site for the nuanced public negotiation of performances of African contemporaneity.

Her 'Money and Matter' is made up of series of nine images that examine the relationship of human beings to capital, both on a personal level and from a social perspective. She uses entertainment technologies as a vehicle for commentary on various and conflicting histories, journeys and materials of her experience. Money as a symbol, is both a subject and object of what people desire and fear. The main theme is the tension between the money's power gaming and elements of distraction and the substance of what matters in people's lives.

Here she presents the dynamics of money and matter. In 'Lady and the Maid' the background