By Kekoa Paki
Hello Reader
I recently made a piece called The Past, Present, and Future of the Pacific Northwest for the “Everyone’s a Critic” art contest hosted by the Skagit County Historical Museum, and I would like to tell you about the process that went into making the piece and the themes I intended it to convey.
Any submission to the art contest was supposed to adhere to the theme of ” The Past, Present, and Future of Skagit County.” As soon as I heard the prompt, I immediately had the idea for what I was going to make.
Sketch made while preparing to make “The Past, Present, and Future of the PNW”
But before we get into that, I’d like you to know the context this was in for me. The last quarter of college was very rough for me, mentally speaking, but I won’t go into it too much. But what you need to know is that I was very sad and tired and hadn’t been able to do art in a while because I was paranoid of falling behind in college. So I was excited when I learned of the contest, as it was a chance for me to make art again. Unfortunately, I learned of the challenge 10 days before submissions for the challenge were due. After a slight crash-out and grinding in school for 2 days to get all of my assignments out of the way, I was ready to start production.
Sketch made while preparing to make “The Past, Present, and Future of the PNW”
After learning of the prompt, I immediately had the idea of a dead Mother Nature, killed by industrialization. This would represent how humanity (or like 1% of humanity) are currently killing the once flourishing world for the sake of profit in exchange for dooming humanity as a species. You see, I took an environmental science class last quarter, so I was thinking about climate change a lot at the time.
I liked the idea of literally portraying this theme in the form of a dead woman, but I also played around with presenting the idea in the form of a landscape. I ended up sticking with my original vision.
I chose to divide the composition of this piece into three parts: The 1st section represents the past and is defined by yellow tones, and features animals representing the once flourishing environment. The 2nd section represents the present and is defined by red tones. It features a group of miners drilling into Mother Nature and one miner being whipped by a capitalist in a top hat. The 3rd section is defined by blue tones and represents the future. It features the face of the dead Mother Nature, and the same group of miners from before now hanging upside down from underwater nooses, representing how the human species, in a sense, killed itself (like I said, it’s more like 1% of the population killed the other 99% of the population, and themselves, in the pursuit of infinite profit.)
Sketch made while preparing to make “The Past, Present, and Future of the PNW”
Fun fact: the reason there are 8 miners particularly is because, at the time I was making the piece, there were around 8 billion people on Earth.
Photo taken at the opening of the “Everyone’s a Critic” exhibit at Skagit County Historical Museum
While I thought the premise of my piece was strong, I wanted to connect it a little more directly to the PNW. I did this partly by modeling Mother Nature after a PNW native woman. I wish I could have implemented more Native American aesthetics into the piece, but as I said, I was on a strict deadline, and I didn’t have the time to research PNW native culture enough to respectfully integrate it into this work, I felt.
I also incorporated animals native to the PNW into the piece, including a black bear, white tail deer, big horn sheep, mountain lion, beaver, American robin, and coyote. Additionally, I chose to model the insides of Mother Nature off of those of a whale rather than those of a human for 3 reasons: to harken back to an iconic PNW animal, the killer whale; to make the viewer think of the overhunting of cetaceans which almost led to their extinction, and because human fat has a yellowish tone which would have muddied up the color palette of this section.
Photo taken at the opening of the “Everyone’s a Critic” exhibit at Skagit County Historical Museum
I completed the piece in under a week and dropped it off to the very nice person at the counter of the Skagit County Historical Museum.
Photo taken at the opening of the “Everyone’s a Critic” exhibit at Skagit County Historical Museum
As of the time I’m writing this, the opening of the “Everyone’s a Critic” show was last night. I came to the event in person, and it went well, I think. I met some other artists. I got my photo taken for the local paper that was neat. As it turns out there was an option to bring business cards be handed out by the museum, which I wasn’t aware of, so that’s great, a bunch of free publicity down the drain. But I’m handling that as I type. Regardless, it was still a good night.
Anyways, this blog post is long enough, and I’m trying to get this out fairly quickly, so I’ll end it here. If you have any questions about this piece, feel free to leave a comment or message me directly.
And with that said, thanks for reading this blog post and have a good day.
From,
Kekoa Paki
Kekoa Paki Arts 
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