In & Around Design: Kestin Cornwall
Join us on Wednesday, February 24 at 12pm EST for a talk from Kestin Cornwall, a Canadian contemporary painter who will be joining us for a talk entitled The Black Effect. The Black Effect A discussion on North American media while asking questions for the culture. Kestin Cornwall aims to create art to document change and to ask questions. Cornwall tries to approach his work as a visual thinker and tries to think critically. Media has often distorted representations of Black and Brown males; how they speak, love, and live. The North American media industry is the largest globally. Therefore it has a massive effect on how the world views minorities, specifically Black and Brown males. Cornwall has seen how this affects design. With his work, Cornwall wants to humanize Black women and Black men while uniquely representing them. Kestin Cornwall uses images to explore the notion that culture, entertainment, including film and other media, shape the mass public perception of black people and people of colour in North American culture. He creates art to document this with compositions brimming with references to media, popular culture, music, and art history. Cornwall has said, “As Black people, Indigenous people and people of colour, we are not accustomed to seeing nuanced reflections of ourselves in contemporary visual culture. I create work featuring many of these faces and issues we encounter in an attempt to be accurately represented in modern pop culture. “ Cornwall enjoys challenging what’s considered “common” and feels an artist must add beauty to the world while invoking the unending social responsibility to capture thought.
Date and Time
Feb 24, 2021 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST
Location
Online
Meet our Speakers
Kestin Cornwall
Kestin Cornwall grew up in the Windsor Ontario area. His father is Grenadian and his mother is American, he spent much of his youth in Detroit Michigan with family. In 2001 he moved to Oakville, Ontario to begin his training at Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning. While completing the Art Fundamentals and Illustration programs, Cornwall’s focus and love for the arts grew quickly. He increasingly combined both classical drawing and painting with modern digital reproduction and screen-printing. Over the past ten years, Cornwall has focused on creating relevant progressive art. He has used a varied practice of combining hand drawings, digitally removing the human hand and then forcing the element of the human hand back into the work. Cornwall uses images to explore the notion that culture, entertainment including film and other media, shape the mass public perception of black people and people of colour in North American culture. Cornwall critically charts current political, social, and economic landscapes with compositions brimming with references to media, popular culture, music, and art history. He enjoys challenging what’s considered “common” and feels it is the duty of an artist to add beauty to the world while invoking the unending social responsibility to capture thought. Many of his influences include contemporary graphic realism, street art and old comics, with a complimenting factor of mystery, often mirroring timeless depictions of pop culture. Each piece depicts an analysis of our obsession with beauty, age and change. Kestin Cornwall lives and works in Toronto. For more information, visit Kestin's website or Instagram.
Video Highlights
![](https://theadcc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Kestin-Cornwall-1024x768.jpg)
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