Gilvano Swasey’s “Reduced for Quick Sale”
Belizeans
are big into discount shopping, whether the store’s having a sale or not.
But while most of us walk in and grab the good buys, one local artist
saw a rip off in progress. And Gilvano Swasey decided to do something
about it. That something is called “Reduced for Quick Sale” and is currently
on a few of the walls at the Image Factory. Today News Five got a tour
of the exhibit and the artist’s own interpretation of his finished product.
Gilvano Swasey, Artist
“Today you could go down to a store and buy love. It will be pampers(diapers), but you can still buy love, and you will say hey I bought love today. Or you can get “Joy”, but there is no joy in washing dishes. So there is an irony. You don’t have to go and do these things, we are human being and we can have more respect for each other.”
“I started looking and I realized that everything in life has been reduced for quick sale. Everything has a price, even us, even the consumer. At the end of the day, we are the products, we are the one being bought and sold. So what I started doing, was that I started to work on the human aspect of it first. I started looking at photos that I had and I started looking at the people and their emotions, and I tried to document them in a way where they would not resemble the real person that they are, I place them in psychedelic colours. Then I started picking out people in photographs, that were not in focus, people that I could not relate to even though I had captured them, and I started painting them too. And from the human aspect, I went into what you can call the consumer aspect or the supermarket aspect. I started looking at the products and they had the same feelings that we had. They had joy, they had envy, they were equals, and there was comfort. They were everything, and I realized that how the producers have placed their products in such a way, that we could have related to it. They could get on our sensitive side and that we would want their stuff.”
“At the end of the day, I still go and buy these stuff to be honest, but then I try to tell myself…you know the more you tell yourself something then you start believing it, but then what I said was that I am sure that I am not the only one suffering from this thing, so I wanted to tell everybody about it too. So what I did was get these images and blow them up about ten times the size, so people can really get a view of it and try to tell them that hey this is wrong, you don’t have to buy this stuff, you don’t have to buy artificial sweetening, you can get the regular sugar, it does the same job. So it was something personal, and something for everybody to relate to, or to react to.”
“As an artist I know Belize is still pretty young in what we call modern art or contemporary art. We are still used to pretty pictures and everything looking alike and everybody having the same thing. The same thing with the consumer world, if you go to buy, everything is packaged the same way. And if you say that you want to be original, I don’t want to eat what that person eats, but you go and buy the same thing. You look at what’s in that guy’s shopping cart and you want the same thing. So what I have done as an artist, I have tried to mix my stuff slowly, to make people get adapted, to know that I am someone who is not the same. I’ll be changing and I think that they are ready for something like this, something where they don’t have to…where they won’t come in and say wow! I didn’t expect this because I have come from realistic to abstract to experimental work and I’ve gotten to this stage, where I think people will come and see and say okay, I should have expected this or I know he was going to do something crazy like this, so I think they will adapt to it. With my paintings, I have changed a little because I have zoomed in on certain parts. First I did the whole picture because I thought they wanted to see the whole picture, but then I realize that if you give people the same thing over and over, they won’t want anything else, they’ll get used to it. So I said okay, let me try something different. So I focused on different parts of the whole picture, just to pinpoint something out and say hey, this stuff has feelings or this stuff needs to be noticed too.”
“I want them to think about life and how, why we have gotten to this point where everything is for sale, and why we have gotten to this point where everybody has a price. We all say that hey, I can’t be bought, nobody can pay me for this stuff, but really at the end of the day…I used to say at the end of the day, I have a price. If I need the money, I need to go do it. I am not saying that you’re going to do something bad, but really at the end of the day everybody has a price.”
All the pieces in this exhibit have been reduced for sale. The exhibit ends on July 14th.