Tyler Sures

 The aim of my artistic research is to explore how media influences our perception and identity in the context of race and ethnicity, and use this knowledge to create a counter-statement and awaken society to the ways that they are being influenced. I hope to accomplish this by looking at communication theory and how a message can be influenced, as well as looking at the psychology of perception and visual symbolism and by doing interviews with visible minorities. My artistic practice will be completed in the medium of painting, referencing the tradition of portraiture and hopefully elevating the subject matter to a level where a closer relationship is created between the viewer and the object.

A person is a product of their environment with television, advertising and popular culture shaping how we see ourselves in our ‘world’ and see others. We are constantly bombarded with images and ideas telling us how we should dress, how we should think, and how we should view our world. We experience this as perception, as action, as statement – as “information processing,” the basis for all intelligent behaviour. This intelligent behaviour describes a property of the mind that encompasses reason, problem solving, abstract thought, comprehension, language, and our ability to learn. Basically it attacks the very core of our knowledge, swaying our political and social views at a total subconscious level.

A study taken in 1998 revealed that by the end of high school, the average student would have spent 15,000 hours watching television and only 11,000 hours in a classroom, confirming that media had become less of a form of leisure and more a vehicle for communicating values and ethics in peoples’ lives. The result of this is that the world is understood more and more in images and less and less in words. The problem with this is twofold;

The first being the nature of how mass media communicates: It utilizes many mediums, and depending on this medium is constantly sending messages to receivers. The result is a bombardment of messages that becomes so a constant that it assimilated itself into our daily lives as a norm, or as an everyday experience of our existence, and thus we no longer become aware of the effects it has on us. “By the time you become conscious of what you are doing, you already have years of experience with your own behaviour; from birth one has done little else besides amass knowledge about it” (Arjen, 52). This is how mass media effects our perception and worldview. Through its constant bombardment it acts as experience, altering our perception to the point where we begin to communicate and interact in our world in the same way that mass media does, consequently transferring the same views and opinions into us.

The second problem with this is Media’s tendency to oversimplify and reduce reality to absolutes, to black-and-white, or good versus evil, and its tendency to create roles for people that are often accepted in society. The result of this over generalization is the creation of stereotypes, reducing an ethnicity or race down to an icon, a collection of static verbal and visual traits that represent a whole culture. To see an example of this, one would only need to look at the attention North American media paid during the last US elections to the question of whether or not Barrack Obama was a Muslim, and consequently, could be a threat to the United States.