Natasha Matila-Smith is the last artist I looked at during my brief. I found her work ‘I Think You Like Me But I’ve Been Wrong About These Things Before’ on the Artspace website and immediately was interested in the ideas surrounding their exhibition.
Natasha examines states of sadness and despair as a consequence of the failure to achieve self-fulfillment. And for me, this stood out from all the other exhibitions I looked through. Mainly, because whilst in this brief I was struggling with achieving self-fulfillment and was also taking a look at my own sadness as a consequence of that. Especially in lockdown alert level 4 with having no contact with anyone because I live alone. Not reaching that self-fulfillment needs of social interaction, or even just being able to achieve self-fulfillment through enjoying things because I was so focused on my university and outside uni curricular, volunteering, and mahi to achieve the joy I needed.
I also thought that their idea of that also tied into my own art practice with my Snapchat images. The sadness of not being able to achieve the self-fulfillment I got from keeping up with my eating posts/images reminded me of their examination of their sadness and despair. If I missed days of not eating and then consequently not posting an image of that I’d feel really down about it, and or if I was super late posting/eating that day. As seen in the image before in my caption.
