Imants Tiller and the Diaspora Triology

Diaspora Trilogy is the story of Tillers’ family’s history; Diaspora is the introduction to it. Questions of his identity and his past, center and periphery can be found all over Diaspora, because these were the biggest issues to Tillers. I believe that Tillers being an Australian-born child of Latvian immigrants is experiencing lost of self across the two cultures, and he aims to find his complete identity through creating the Diaspora Trilogy.

Diaspora was completed in 1992, the first of the Diaspora trilogy, made up of 288 canvas boards in the shades of brown, red, white and black. There are 48 paintings, each formed by 6 panels. The paintings are arranged together to form the large Diaspora. It’s compiled of numbers, roman numerals, use of metaphors and biblical quotations.

‘You Must Face the Fact’, ‘I and thou

Tillers is recognized for employing the techniques of ‘appropriation’ or ‘quotation’ in his paintings. It is his way to reframe the traditional history art and modernism, in the way of deconstructing by altering and combining the images that he finds in art magazines and catalogues, then incorporating his own emotions and opinions. In Diaspora, the numbers and roman numbers from Colin McCahon’s ‘Rocks in the sky’ series, the four long neck ‘I’-shaped faces are of a motif from Baselitz in ‘A Painting Which Does Not Speak, 1989’ are merely a few paradigms of Tillers’ reappropriations. I assume to Tillers, it is irrelevant to the whole art-world because in the age of mechanical reproduction, the notion of originality is unnecessary and pointless. I guess Tillers doesn’t see the purpose of creating something new and different that people wouldn’t understand or even be fond of, when he can simply bring in his thoughts into images that he has connections with, it would be easy for Tillers to expose himself in order to penetrate into people’s souls.

On each left bottom corner, the 6-panel module of Diaspora, Izkliede, and Paradiso are different Colin McCahon’s works from his ‘Rocks in the sky’ series. Tillers was particularly interested in McCahon’s use of numbers, especially with two closed number sequences: 1- 10 and 1- 14. On the top right and bottom left section of Diaspora, there are the combination of roman numerals and numbers of 1 – 14. Throughout Diaspora, the fact that Tillers adopted ‘I’ instead of ‘1’ and ‘I’ in the roman numerals and numbers appears to intensify the feeling of self and of his family history, making Diaspora more personal than his previous oeuvres. The recurrence of ‘I’s demonstrated how powerfully this work is associated with his personal life. It also proves how crucial it was for Tillers to find himself, and incapable of expressing his feelings and thoughts, Tillers expressed himself in a paradoxical form using McCahon’s ‘voice’. Tillers uses other artists’ voices to tell his family history due to the fact of his personal issues, and the impact of his parents’ trauma had on him. And by using other artists ‘voices’ to narrate his family story will create a more powerful bond between him and the

Some topics in this essay:
Diaspora Tillers, Izkliede Paradiso, World War, Painting Speak, Colin McCahon’s, Diaspora Trilogy, Trilogy Diaspora, Colin McCahon, Tillers’ Latvian, War Tillers, world war, diaspora trilogy, section diaspora, izkliede paradiso, trilogy diaspora, diaspora trilogy diaspora, roman numerals, colin mccahon’s ‘rocks, canvas boards, sky’ series, mccahon’s ‘rocks sky’, history diaspora, 3 6-panel, references izkliede paradiso, textual references izkliede,