Kitties and titties attack! The collage work of Christa D’Angelo

Born in South Korea, raised in NYC and having studied in Krakow, Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo is a visual artist now living and working in Berlin. Her current exhibition 100% Napalm is a reaction toward media-propagated ideals and visual oversaturation, leading the viewer to ponder the power we give to ubiquity. The focal point of the exhibition is a wall covered in 100 collages, recontextualizing mass-produced images (such as nude women and cats) to explore dominant perceptions of “beauty, gender, human fulfillment, tragedy and triumph”. And while all the collages share some aesthetic sensibility, each individual piece exists in its own distinct world and tells a unique story.

If you’re in Berlin, be sure to check out 100% Napalm at Kuma Galerie, and if you’re not, you can at least visit her website to view some of her vibrant work, not just collages but some drawings as well. A Q&A session with the artist follows below.

Expatriarch: The title of your current exhibition is 100% Napalm, and there’s certainly an explosive quality to your collages. Do you see your process or product as a gesture of violence?

Christa: The exhibition is really a survey of my larger body of work which are 100 collages, so the entire collection is titled 100% Napalm. Many people say that there is a bursting element to all of the works in the collection, like explosions of information being televised, since the color schemes are akin to what we see in every media driven source. I suppose some of the work is violent at first glance, but the work is also based on the aggressive nature of media propaganda which is anything but benign. So in contrast to the work in 100% Napalm with the aggressive magnitude of the media, my work is a baby lamb and the media the big bad wolf disguised in the lamb costume.

I’m no visual art critic; I think mostly in terms of sound and music. Would you say your collage work is more analogous with musique concrète, or with hip-hop? Or both? Or is this a silly question?

I would say that the collages have a strong relationship with popular culture or what is happening in the everyday world. Growing up in NYC in the 90s with hip-hop may have informed my process and sensibility, but I never attempted to emulate my musical influences at all. My work is very much improvised so I suppose it can seem “cut and pasted” like sampling in Hip-hop, but actually I do see our culture relying on the appropriation of content in both art, music, film and in fashion right now. It seems almost common and without reason — I mean, how many remakes of movies have they done this year already for no reason other than to make profit? For me it is important to have reasons for doing things in my work — that does not include making money as first priority — so I often appropriate in order to address issues that concern public interest, so it’s not just about the material or collage. There’s no such thing as a silly question, with few exceptions of course. By the way do you think BP is ever going to ever clean up the oil spill entirely?

In your interview with I Love You, your statement that struck me the most was about women in the media who “are portrayed as a generic Barbie doll with much less of an individual character than [their] male counterparts and [are] often sexualized. To me they are comparable to props that just occupy visual space and do not fulfill any particular role other than being ‘present’ in an image.” Not that you should be overly concerned about how your work is interpreted, but wouldn’t you find it ironic if someone viewed your work and simply thought, “Oh, hey, titties!”?

My work is about communication and communicating ideas that critique a lot of things going on around us at close range. Yes, there are some obvious things in the imagery itself, but that also exists for the purpose of irony and seeing beyond the obvious. In general, the obvious tend to seek attention in the worst way possible, but with closer inspection there is more than just “body parts and pink icing” in my work. That is for people to uncover and for them to exercise their mind. But some people tend to interpret things in a way that makes sense to them, I believe. That’s why titles exist, but people always interpret and assume what they don’t know with what they do know more often than not. The work is there for people to see and to communicate ideas, but I never try to cater to everyone, or the work would not be honest to what I think is important for people to see and to know. That would be lying to my audience and art is about communicating ideas — not trying to fit a trend or a mold of popular taste. If a person were to say that, then I would assume they would fail to see a larger part of not only my work but also life.Aside from being good source material for collages, what is your opinion on pornography? On one hand, you’re critical of social taboos, but on the other, the majority of porn (marketed toward heterosexual males) doesn’t portray women fairly.

Pornography is like icing on a cake – simple, colorful, easy to consume, detrimental in copious amounts, no nutritional value – but people go for it in the masses. The porn in the work has more to do with sexuality, and l think pornography is something very different from sexuality. But I do utilize pornography, or for that matter, all content to appear or to at least personify a narrative I have in my head. Most of the time there is an element of irony in the work since life is ironic, so the usage of sexual imagery is employed ironically in order for it to be critical. However, I concur that most sexual content that does exist caters to WASP male heterosexuals, but that tends to be the dominant group of consumers in wealthy countries who can afford such material, I reckon. Having that been said, the content of 100% Napalm addresses issues of gender and, of course, beauty within popular taste through the use of sexual content. Largely it should introduce the question of how much of what we do is defined or at least propelled by the media, which should in theory serve as a source of information and not define society’s aspirations, desires, and standards.

Can you name any examples of media (whether TV shows, magazines, etc.) that offer a fully three-dimensional portrayal of women?

Hmm… that is a very difficult question since I think everything is biased in the media. Whether it is with good intentions or not, it always contains a point of view, so I am not sure how real of a portrayal it can be, since the portrayal is often based on a preconceived image or an idea. History has always embellished female characters, it seems. They are either dominant or submissive, witty or dumb, aristocratic or trashy. There is never an in-between or a fleshed out persona of the everyday woman, I think. Surely the characters in the media tend to embody a particular visual image, and typically that accords to Hollywood ideals or taste, something prescribed. However, in Hollywood there was a three dimensional element that was in Avatar but that falls about 1,000 miles short from what it was alluding to, and that’s a 3-D portrayal of reality, which Hollywood can never deliver.

Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo: 100% Napalm
Now through 3rd of July, 2010
Kuma Galerie, Novalisstr. 7, S-Nordbahnhof / U-Oranienburger Tor, Berlin-Mitte

Top photo by Jan Sobottka.