This week I’ll be taking a look at the recent work of Artist Sam Marroquin in an episode titled, “Text In Early Modern Art : Artifacts of Mass Media.”

In her recent work Samantha Marroquin pays tribute to the work of some of her hero’s and continues the search for social understanding in our industrialized lives. When we look at the work of George Braque, Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Hoch and other early modernists, we begin to see artists making efforts to create a new visual language for the emerging mechanized modern world. Gone is the previous focus on nature and the agrarian lifestyle. In the yeas since the breakout of impressionism a new industrialized world had begun to mature. The emergence of mass marketing and print media had changed the nature of our visual landscape. Einstein’s Relativity and World War had changed our understanding of reality. Artists began to look for a new aesthetic that could speak to these changing times.

Assembling the cast off pieces of yesterday’s news and packaging artists discovered a visual poetry that hadn’t been seen before. Something new, compelling and visually relevant to the “Now” emerged as a means for artistic language and social discourse. Addressing the questions of, “How does the human relate to the machine and it’s industry?”  And, “How and where, do our human souls fit into this unknown mechanized nature?” Soon to come is the commercialization of radio and television waves, air travel, the new frontiers of Atomic science and telecom, and more.

It is the graphic mixture of visual language and human themes that makes Marroquins’ work so compelling. Her work helps us to reassemble the scraps of our yesterdays. Collectively we search for our “Now”. Seeking to find out how our society is dealing with the complexities of:  Where is home? Where is safety found? and, What is real? 

These changes that appeared at the beginning of the 20th century are still informing artwork today. Now in the 21st century we find ourselves searching for answers to similar questions. In many ways the questions remain stable as the language morphs and vocabularies change. This thread of Artists and their work bridging more than a century of time, continues to inform current insights into our epic questions of human existence.