Summayyah B. – Hand on Heart

Summayyah B.

Magazines are a very interesting way of viewing the world, as is all pop culture. There’s a mundanity as well as an oversaturated fakeness to them, a carefully curated presentation of the cultural heritage at the time. This piece is mostly a collage of various magazines, notably 90s National Geographics and 2010s beauty and fashion pieces. The combination of the two is interesting to me, and I tried to include a lot of rawness in the piece- like the jaguar’s open mouth and the bloody carcass making up part of the right hand strawberry. The piece as a whole is about intimacy and distance- are the hands forcing their way into a bleeding heart? The clippings of words throughout the piece are things I came across in magazines which resonated with me. The most eye catching of course is “I’m sorry, I don’t have any problems”, and there’s really nothing better to sum up the piece as a whole. No one truly has no problems, but a lot of us want other people to think we don’t. It’s forcibly creating distance and not completely letting the viewer in.