End of Term (First Year Exhibition)

"BGK Makes and Installation I --or-- OMFG A MUTHERFUCKING METAPHOR"

Mixed-media installation, Baby Girl Kriegbaum 2011

Hanna Umin

Second Term Evaluative Report

Seeing my year's work, most of it at least, in a single place, and as a single substance, is something which I feel has been a huge benefit. The "willy-nilly" approach mentioned in my last evaluation has, in a way, been a series of ongoing experiments to find a way to place every facet, every goal of my work into a single canvas or frame, which is an ambition I now can let go of. 

Baby Girl Kriegbaum, a pseudonym deriving from a hospital's formula for legally filing an unnamed baby, is an expression of the transient nature of character; a label and a logo, as well as a hidden stamp referring to the esoteric, personal nature behind an otherwise thick-skinned body of work. As someone who has not only moved place, but also family, and life, multiple times over the course of a short(and young) existence, I've found R.B. Kitaj's Diasporist Manifesto extremely relatable. Living off manna yet buying myself root-vegetables, Kitaj's explanation of the artist-nomad's adaptive yet discomforted qualities, of the tension underneath his dried paint, has perhaps given me a degree of insight regarding the interchangable nature of my pieces, and their dependancies upon one another: nothing is precious, but all is collected. I doubt my work will ever be polished in the "gallery-ready", professional sense--my attitudes considering cleanliness and stability are permanently defeatist-- but what I can do is learn to utilize my mess. Instead of marketing an object, I am marketing a name and an aesthetic which is slowly but surely accumulating, and my "nook" feels like the first experiment with and manifestation of this phenomenon. 

Submission is a form of dominance; the self-deprecating joke hints at an awareness and control which forces the user up in the social hierarchy of a conversation. Therefore, it is also an act of desperation. An installation is an art-world gimmick.

By sectioning off my work, I am not following in the political footsteps of the installation's original purpose, to more "actively involve" the viewer in a piece. My work is as two-dimensional as it ever was. I am also quite obviously not attempting to close it off from a gallery context or claim some form of autonomy from contemporary culture. It is merely an attempt to saturate the viewer in an aesthetic, to create a hot-house of conflicts and similarities, an environment damp and dirty enough to support an ecosystem. I am literally and figuratively creating a niche, pushing a style.

Something engulfing and detailed, shocking yet familiar. Something claustrophobic yet womb-like, a piece which is unsettled and conglomerate, esoteric in meaning yet amusing on the surface: I want my work to be a circus act, a self-debasing, self-sufficient yet spreadable entity which rankles along on the poorly-crafted wheels of an oft-repeated metaphor for the otherworldly and unique. A parasite.

With love,

Baby Girl Kriegbaum.


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