CULTURAL INCLUSION
BENJAMIN NORMAN
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work explores the challenges of cultural identity and the way in which most first and second generations of immigrants tend to lose their cultural heritage in some compacity. With personal experience and notice of others dealing with the same dilemma, they tend to lose connections of their ancestors. This is used with digital illustrations of characters with different understandings of the Filipino culture. My work invites the viewers to engage in cultural history for American-born-Filipinos and encourage more Filipino identities within multimedia. Current works uses the mythologies within the Filipino culture and the stories that are apart of the culture. Recently, I have been exploring more about Filipino culture as a way to help have a sense of understanding to the world through culture.
ARTIST BIO
Benjamin Norman, born in San Francisco, is an interdisciplinary digital media artist with a focus on 3-Dimensional modeling and digital illustration. He is in the process of receiving his BFA in Digital Media Art from San José State University (SJSU). He aspires to create world concepts through immersive 3D environments and character design. His work explores the challenges with the Filipino culture and identity being present in current medias, such as movies, video games and television shows. Using the essence of lost culture to have his viewers understand the challenges of not fully being able to understand ones self with minimal guidance. His inspiration primarily comes from the virtual reality artist Bobby Pontillas. His work will be featured at the BlackBox Gallery at the Hammer Theatre, San José, and on the virtual platform New Art City as part of the upcoming Digital Media Arts thesis exhibition at SJSU.
