Untitled - Centre for Comparative Literature - University of Toronto

there “authentic” dissent? Or is the notion of anything “authentic” our attempt to categorize
and value the objects around us? Is dissent simply a manufacturing of information for
consumption by few, privileged people? Can useful and meaningful action or dialogue
ensue from such manufacturing?
We (humans) manufacture dissent. We are bombarded with literature, art, and
modes of communication and marketing that propagate a sense of subverting some
governing authority or meta-narrative. Dissent has become a commodity fetish. Yet,
despite dissent dissolving into the world of simulacrum, all forms of dissidence serve
as entry ways into critical views of our global condition. My painting is an attempt to
subvert the aesthetic of “green cubism,” underscore dissent as socially, politically and
economically manufactured, and, through the images in the pills, to point to a particular
narrative of global dissent: the image of the Matryoshka dolls underscore Baudrillard’s
notion never-ending simulacrum; the spiral staircase symbolizes the time and space
compression that David Harvey theorizes in his The Condition of Postmodernity (1990);
the pink elephant represents a manifestation of the large and looming issues that no one
is willing to address; the image of the child soldier conveys an unsettling violence, like
the violence in Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2005); the image of the woman
looking on a child is from Nilita Vachani’s documentary, When Mother Comes Home
for Christmas (1996), and underscores the global mobility of the human as commodity;
the image of the fi sh with a gasmask is from the cover of Neal Stephenson’s Zodiac:
An Eco-Thriller (1988), and points to the accumulation – and our ignorance of such
accumulation – of toxins in the environments that surround us; the image of humans as
garbage is a poignant image that Jamaica Kincaid draws on in her unapologetic critique of
Western tourists, A Small Place (1988); and the image of the light at the end of the tunnel
reminds us all dissent represents a manufactured, tunneled-vision of particular realities.
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