Steve Lovett

David Wojnarawicz 1991 Photostat one day
Mother and Daughter by Steve Lovett

Millennium Walking 2000 by Steve Lovett

Steve Lovett
21, Aug., 2009
Aspects of an artist identity can define their practice. Discuss how the role of identity is important in the practice of Steve Lovett and then how it might be important in your own art making.

Steve is a visual arts practitioner and art educator with considerable and broad print-based knowledge His practice compacts his thinking related to the role and identification in the society.Viewing a series of slides introducing the process of his development about his print works. Some artists who inspired him and made him extend and explore different ways to his art works with extraordinary mediums.

As an art educator who are struggling to acquire new skills. Continually adventured the unfamiliar conceptual and mechanical field into the connection between tradition and new technologies of image-making. His work adds an additional focus of how new imaging technologies impact on more traditional print making practices. Much of his work is printed. Printed images are nomadic by nature. They are about recording, processing and transmission information.

His research are primarily concerned with questions of time , transition, loss and the narratives of location and displacement. Exploiting the techniques of audio and typography with the images to imply the conflict and emotion between his identification with the society, culture even the politics and history.

Glenn Ligon, Glenn Ligon, October 27 - December 8, 2007; No Room (Gold) #13, 2007
Around the time of the Million Man March in Washington DC ,the American painter Glenn Ligon observed that the way that painting looks in on itself was no longer enough. There was a need use something other than paint to make an image. From that time on Ligon has used language and photography to respond to the world.
By early the early 1990s the impact of HIV AIDS on his world was that painting was set aside for something more able to report events from the world. Maybe not more truthful, but certainly more direct.

David Wojnarowicz 1991 Photostat One Day
Wojnarowicz makes his social and political circumstances, his sexual orientation is the center of his work.

It’s a life © Steve Lovett 1992

Formally some concerns with the voice of the subject becoming present in the work. This piece is perhaps the first work where narrative becomes expressed through patterns of speech. Narration being means to metabolize the world and our experience of it.

Millennium Walking 2000. commissioned by the Tautai Trust .
Vinyl billboard 2.8 m X 48 m. © Steve Lovett.
The work is the transcription of a series of interviews and conversations with people in the immediate area, The piece developed a visual solution - looking for a typographic solution for the spoken word. The collaborators introduced their mates to volunteer a story to the archive-it make the work became a network, it's a kind of social activity.
The Millennium Walking piece deployed a similar visual solution - looking for a typographic solution for the spoken word.

A series slides with detailed introduction about Steve’s works. Steve as an open gay man tells his own stories through his print works. The shift s of the process on his works into the exploration about the issues of identity. The identification about his sexual orientation, and his then and now. It’s related to “who you are?”, where are you from”, and “how did you grow up?”, “What’s majority culture?”.
The identification of himself impact on his works. It’s not only an art work but an social, political issues. The art became an accused tool to tell his own story over grief in the public. The art is public, it belongs to the audience.

As a Taiwanese in New Zealand, sometimes I feel isolated from the majority society where I am now .There are many contradictions between my cultural background and the surroundings around me. I might experiment to depict indigenous images into my practice from my culture, like the motifs from Taiwanese Mountain People (There are 13 tribes of the native people in Taiwan). I would be mostly based on the visual imagery rather than the thinking of identification. The work I intend to focus on the impact of the visual effect instead of the implied meaning of identification.