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Notes
on Transmodern concepts
Have Modernist movements painfully crushed the core values of traditional
cultures that don’t embrace industrial destruction? Is Post-modernism
a bad hoax convincing people they are meaningless fluff running around like
computer-generated programs in a video game? Can we be saved by the Transmodern
Age where extremely diverse traditions infuse industrial states bringing
greater tolerance for communal and sacred acts?
The expression of tradition and cultural solidarity through adornment presents
a variety of pleasures and problems for our culture. It represents in some
ways exactly where cultural lines are drawn and presents undeniable images
we have to grapple with whether it be an uptight straight guy coping with
a transgendered person at work or a liberal lesbian confronting a group
of heavily veiled Islamic women on the streets of Baltimore. The expression
of individuality, alienation, and lack of an identifiable culture through
adornment also provides a rich source of visual and intellectual stimulation.
How do we choose what we wear and how to display it? What do we put on our
skin? How do we shave or cut our hair? What feels good and what feels bad?
Does it have to do with sexuality or social anxiety? Identity or anonymity?
In this show we invite the artists to create personal adornment based the
idea of reflecting their own unique personal, intellectual or creative culture,
family, personal traditions and/or lack of the same. Think of it as being
put on a strange planet and being asked by the inhabitants to present the
whole of your being via a ceremonial adornment that must reflect all your
ideals, dreams, intellectual pursuits and emotional life while at the same
time representing your failures, hatreds and dreads. You will become an
avatar to this alien planet guiding them into your Transmodern Age…..
--- Catherine Pancake, organizer Transmodern Age
Transmodernism is a term applied to the spiritual, religious, artistic,
intellectual, cultural, political, literary, agricultural, cultic, academic,
esoteric, philosophical, economic, and educational thinking of those who
collectively are looking for one thing – a solution and an end to
the doom-laden, self-fulfilling prophecy of digressive, ironic, and empty
self-satisfaction combined with the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of culture
and identity in what we’ve been calling the Postmodern Era. Postmodernism
at its worse considers the future to be dead, or on its way -- nothing will
ever be new again and nothing will ever change… ideas and images ripped
off from the past and buried on top of one another.
Transmodernists are looking forward to another future where people (with
their identities intact) effect global change and create brave new art.
– Bonnie Jones, co-founder CHELA
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