An Installation by Luke Foster
“If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress.”
Barack Obama
I was going to add the art joke: No more fat and felt about trying not to imitate one of my favourite artists the German Joseph Beuys who used fat and felt as metaphors of healing the world after his plane crashed in the second world war in the Crimea and the native Tartars wrapped him in fat and felt. However, I feel I need to move on from Beuys and find more contemporary influences such as those women and men in the artist book in this installation.
There is, eight t-shirts of famous and influential Americans with their name and portrait drawn on them with black sharpie pens and two others for two people to wear. At this stage I still have three t-shirts still to draw but have to figure out the buses to go to Kmart in town to get the white t-shirts.
The videos and the photos in the installation I have talked about quite a bit in detail but the twenty-four yellow envelope drawings haven’t been seen before but I have made a short wobble cam video of them.
When I was working on this project, I realised that I had far too many men and not enough women so I Googled and found more and asked the female Baristas at my local café: Kyla and Ocean to give me some examples and they came up with three.
I love this quote by Amelia Earhart and its sage advice for what I am going through at the moment:
“The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.” Amelia Earhart
In conclusion I hope my friends in America like this installation as the drawings in the book and the hand drawn t-shirts were a bit rushed but I feel the videos and photos and yellow envelope drawings were stronger. I have a lot of gratitude for the way my friends in America have helped me.
“Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.”
Woodrow Wilson
