Week of November 26, 2009, Issue #736
ARTS
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Leslie Robinson's thesis project is a text-heavy glimpse of working with Ugandan youth
Adam Waldron-Blain / adamwb@vueweekly.com
Leslie Robinson's Designing Public Health Messages for Youth, by Youth is a research-based thesis project, and as installed in FAB Gallery it comes with a lot of text. The posters that greet you as you enter the space are placed opposite a huge gallery-length reproduction of one of the murals she and a group of Ugandan youth created. It's not the quantity of text on the posters that makes them trying to read though, it's the content: plentiful bulleted lists of different ways to say "improves self-image" and "builds self-esteem."
Despite the presentation, I don't think that these nothing-statements are the real reason behind Robinson's project. But I'm not sure what her real motivations are. As best seen in the video fragments on display around the corner, Robinson went to great effort to create a bi-directional dialogue with the youth groups she worked with. This counteracts the colonialism-masked-by-charity narrative presented by a white girl going to Africa to teach local black youth about self-worth. But the videos don't create a complete narrative of her work: we get to see the kids partying, learning and performing, but the fragments don't show how Robinson and her collaborators get from there to producing murals, or why they would do so in the first place. Do we take it for granted that kids in Uganda need this specific help? That kind of assumed basis makes it difficult to judge the project itself when all I can see is the gallery show.
Perhaps some of this is addressed in the text of Robinson's thesis, which is ineffectually presented in a binder sitting on a plinth in the gallery. But without the engagement of the gallery show, it's hard to judge the value of the work, and hard to appreciate why it's up on the walls. The reproduced mural can make something of a case for itself, but it's just a start. It reinforces the fun of the positive creative atmosphere that the video subjects seem excited about. The rest of the mural images are small, and crammed into posters showing the artists at work.
I've often written here about lack of purpose in shows, and in this kind of design showcase it's most likely to come up, because the objects on display are supposed to be functional outside of the gallery setting. The show then needs to work on two levels: we need to understand the design constraints and the reasoning and the basis for the work, and through that understanding the work needs to become alive in the gallery. It's difficult, and however good Leslie Robinson is at working with teams of youth to paint public-health murals, it's something that she hasn't mastered yet. It's certainly connected to the central project: it's about communicating the importance of the messages. While gallery-goers are certainly a different audience than that which the murals are aimed at, or the mural-making participants, it's one that needs to be sold equally on the importance of the work. V
Until Sat, Dec 5
Designing Public Health Messages for Youth, by Youth
Featuring Works by Leslie Robinson
FAB Gallery (112 St - 89 Ave)
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