THUNDER BAY - For artist, Elizabeth Buset, art as a political statement is meant to elicit a response in the audience, even if it’s a negative one, because that’s the only way to create real change.
“Art should shape society,” Buset said. “Art needs to not only respond to society but it needs to be the impetus for change and it should really be on the fore front of leading change. It’s never just an aesthetic practice. It has to go beyond that.”
Buset’s latest exhibit, Swine, opening at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery on Dec. 2, goes well beyond aesthetic appeal, as she pushes boundaries of comfort to create a powerful response in the audience, and she hopes, create change.
Swine includes a collection of five high realism oil paintings approximately 70x72 inches of commercially decapitated pigs heads adorned with cheap dollar store items, as well as a collection of more than 80 plastic pig masks, piggy banks, and a silk screening station of propaganda posters.
“The whole concept of the show is reexamining the metaphor As Greedy as a Pig and it’s talking about over consumption in a capitalist society and the impacts of over consumption,” Buset explained.
Pigs have long been a symbol of greed, gluttony, and vice and Buset said she was interested in pigs as both a symbol of the consumed and the consumer.
“Over consumption goes across the board,” she said. “The message we are pitched by the media is: you need to buy more and you need to own more to be happy and it’s just this empty promise that I think a lot of people go for. We just don’t need this stuff.”
Buset clarified that she recognizes the difference between need versus want. There are things people need, but there are also frivolous items consumed every day that are just thrown away, which she represents with the collection of plastic pig masks that she entitled, Collective Guilt.
“I wanted to have frivolous objects included in the show,” she said. “When you are confronted with this entire wall of these masks, I think you realize the repetition of producing the masks but also the repetition of the animals that are slaughtered like this.”
At the centre of Swine are five high realism oil paintings of pig’s heads. The paintings took more than 700 hours to complete and real heads purchased from a local farm were used for models.
“I really believe in local farming,” Buset said. “I’m not against meat or meat production in anyway, I’m really against factory farming because it works on that over-consumption level.”
The paintings are graphic in nature and Buset said the time she spent working on them began to wear on her, but the more time she spent on each one, the more she began to see each animal.
“The more real the paintings became, the more time I put into it and the more realistically rendered they were, the more I came to appreciate the animal’s individualism,” she said.
Buset believes that good art should make the audience uncomfortable and she hopes her exhibit will create a similar reaction.
“I hope they have a real visceral reaction,” she said. “I hope it makes them uncomfortable. I think there’s a really interesting contrast between the beauty of the work and the paintings themselves and the amount of detail involved.”
But this exhibit is not meant to shock simply for the sake of shock. It is meant to create change, to make the viewer think harder about their choices, and about how one individual can help shape society.
“I’m not hoping to change the world, but I’m hoping to start with the individual,” Buset said. “I think when you really take the time to educate yourself of the reality and say: I know this is happening, what can I do, how am I compliant in this, that is when real change happens.”
Swine was produced in part with a grant from the Ontario Arts Council and opens Dec. 2 and runs until Mar. 5 at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery.
