Andrea Bowers Lecture

Andrea Bowers is an artist who focuses on video and photo realist drawings specifically on political activist subject matter. She works with historical, contemporary issues in addition to archive and research. The first work she discussed was a twenty minute video on Emma Goldman and feminist discourse. With the video she investigated the overlap between the personal and political and how Emma negotiated between the two. The four minutes shown of the video included shots of the love letters Emma wrote to her love as well as graveyard shots of his tomb. The images were integrated with a woman’s voice reading aloud and discussing portions of the letters. Bowers sought to show how Emma was trying to live out philosophical and political ideologies. In addition to investigating gesture and the history of the mark and its relation to women, and how that gesture changes when looking at women and politics.

Photo realist drawings and text were a part of all the works she discussed. This was due to the nature of the work in archiving events as well as a personal means of digesting material that Bowers used as a child. She uses graphite or colored pencils based on whether the original photo was black or white or in color. Some of the other works Bowers discussed included political posters in which she spray painted different slogans some old some new. Instead of using plain posters various sorts of wrapping paper was used. This incorporation of wrapping paper is present in other works of Bowers, such as when she did works on the Army of Three. In this piece she took letters written to the three from other women whom wanted help getting abortions. She took the letters and copied them. In which she then put pieces of wrapping paper in between each letter and put it in a bound book and well as displayed some on the walls. Bowers was not only concerned with feminine subjects and their relation to the U.S. but to the world as well, her work on the Holy Sanctuary as well as Marla Ruzicka and Faiz Ali Salim portray that.

Holy Sanctuary discussed the idea of hospitality and immigration. Elvira Arellano was an undocumented woman who was discovered and threatened with deportation even though she had a U.S. born son. To protest the deportation Arellano took residence inside a church. Bowers made a video and of the situation as well as posters and added text to Mexican quilts made in a Spanish pattern and English pattern. She posed the question of what would the U.S. be like if the same hospitality that was shown to Arellano by the church was employed to U.S. boarders. In addition to reaching beyond boarders was her work on Marl and Faiz. The intent of these two was to show an accurate total of civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here she showed how the U.S. media was only concerned with Marlea when the two were killed. She did two sets of copies of the various articles, one copied verbatim by hand and the other copied as well only she erased the sentences that spoke about Marlea and left that which talked about Faiz, which were few.

Bowers also discussed how her pieces are never completely done in so far that she is willing to go back and rework and add and further develop them. This seems appropriate as the past events whether in politics or in art never truly fade away.