M.C. Farris
Born 1971, Texas
Currently living and working as an Artist and Associate Professor of Art for the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in the Borderlands of Texas. (McAllen ,Texas)
About the Artist
I am a mixed media artist that is passionate about challenging people’s perspectives. My art explores issues regarding one’s self, relationships, gender roles, sex, politics, short attention spans, memories, and time. The goal of my work is to challenge people, their thoughts, and ideas to activate the viewer’s cognitive capacity. It is my hope that my art, using mixed media on paper, canvas, and wood will allow people to confront their beliefs, and look at everyday events in a different light.
The Art of M.C. Farris
The goal of M. C. Farris’s art is to challenge people, their thoughts, and ideas to activate the viewer’s cognitive capacity. It is my hope that my art, using mixed media on paper, canvas, and wood will allow people to confront their beliefs, and look at everyday events in a different light.
My art, whether I intend it to or not, is an editorial reflection of contemporary society. Sometimes it is silly and meant to amuse, while often is highly critical of the complex world we live in.
Our attitudes about sex and gender, politics and media, and disruptive innovation upon everything we know, are recorded in my work so they are not lost to short attention spans, fading memory, or the washing of time.
My original intent was to create diverse and divergent works that would aggressively challenge others to confront their beliefs through my work. Once the works are finished, they tend to turn on me and challenge my perceptions instead. Too often I find myself in the same dilemma as Mary Shelley: “I can’t live with Frankenstein and I can’t live without him. “
In my process I make, collaborate, adapt, manipulate, use by sanctioned theft, borrow images, and confiscate text/language at will.
I then put it all through a mental blender, and then spill it out onto a surface that can contain it.
The image is just that, an image in my initial selection process. I go with what I am drawn to.
Then I process the cultural and Pop cultural context. As I am processing this; text, slang, lyrics, and language enter the process. I find I am drawn to the juxtaposition between what information an image can hold in terms of the overall aesthetic, and visual meaning combined with its cultural context.
Then the question arises: what the cultural context is and what happens when I take it out if its original context and place it in a new arena/context?
This then allows the finished works to take on a meaning through my interpretation, and that of the audience.
The current use of lines placed upon figures, animals and objects is used as a unifying action/force of line. It has its origins in the idea of Holding Patterns.
It deals with the idea that personally, societally, or culturally the aforementioned; figures, symbols, animals and objects hold concessions or subconscious meaning held in the psyche of us all.
The addition of text, slang, lyrics, and language enter the process allowing the human mind to take over in order to search for context and meaning.
Thus, I have the viewer engaged in thinking and processing my work.
"I BRING THE FUNK, CAUSE I AM THE MONK OF YO DREAMS": Acrylic/Mix Media on Wood