Artist's Comments

Colliding Cultures Series

In one way or another, a vein of my creative work has encompassed cross-cultural themes such as desire and the subsequent divergence of identities, passion, sense of time, power, and relationship to nature.

I am interested in the sublimation of one culture to another and the creation of an economic resource through the codification of cultural experience. Thus, a façade is created of cultural artifacts and activities that fit within the cultural norms and perceptions of the traveler. Global tourism creates the audience for cultural spectacle and provides the rewards for participants: some people survive economically, while others obtain gratification. An ancient cultural heritage and a people’s history are reduced to explosions of pleasure.

I am interested in the suppression of one culture over another just as an individual can be subjugated by another. I link together the ecstasy of passion to the ecstasy of violence, national imperatives to individual passions.

I am interested in time passing, what it contains, what we might leave behind.
I imagine that the ruins of a Mayan palace and the walls of suburban sheet-rocked houses contain layer on layer of human energy, passion, betrayal, anger, lust, sacrifice, and failure.

I am interested in human bodies as cultural and organic objects, as flesh composed of muscle transfused by societal norms, inextricably linked to and transilluminated by the physical world of nature.

These are concerns that are gradually becoming a cohesive body of work.

-Doug Barkey, 2001