Diamond Stingily: Trophies for Trying
Almost two months on, KOS volunteer Nalisha Kumarasinghe reflects on the work of Diamond Stingily and the importance of sharing POC creative work.
Walking into Gallery 3 of the NGV’S Ground Level, you’re met with a bare white room and shelves of trophies. This is Diamond Stingily’s ‘In the middle but in the corner of 176th place’.
Diamond Stingily is an artist and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Stingily’s large-scale art installation, ‘In the middle but in the corner of 176th place’, portrays society’s fascination with competitiveness, victory, and defeat. The installation suggests an ideology based on the obsession people have with receiving trophies. She brings achievements into a healthy light — talking about the importance of celebrating all wins in life, in an equal manner and not just those larger triumphs.
Stingily’s installation focuses on aspects of her childhood experiences as well as racism that exists within the American culture. It’s well known that a form of structural racism is engraved within the American culture. Wieck (2011) states in his journal that the existence of structural racism has resulted in individuals in minority groups facing social pressures and exclusions in comparison to other groups of people. People of color continually face issues with equality, gaining employment opportunities, conflicts with the law, access to equal education, and so on.
Reflecting on Stingily’s life, it’s clear that classism still exists in modern society today. Such discrimination takes place in society to the extent where individuals in lower social classes are still judged or isolated as a result of indiscretion by certain societal groups. She associates the inscriptions on the plaques of the trophies to classism.
Photo by Nalisha Kumarasinghe
Photo by Nalisha Kumarasinghe
One of the most interesting concepts in her exhibition is the athlete mindset.
To Stingily, an athlete mindset is when an individual maintains a strong focus — always keeping a clear sight of their goals.
Her main inspiration came from working in a competitive environment and growing up around people that experienced both triumph and failure. In a traditional aspect, trophies would be inscribed with the achievement that someone would be awarded for — but in Stingily’s installation, she inscribed conversations that people have based on their efforts based to succeed. Conversations that are followed by efforts to succeed by individual people but are not recognized as awards are traditionally designed to celebrate triumphs.
And when other research showed that individuals tend to perform better when they’re being monitored or observed by another party (for example: a superior observing their employees), Stingily challenged this, too. For her, ‘working hard when you’re not being watched’ became a key concept —plus, the ability to work without any validation from others. Furthermore, she talks about the beliefs surrounding people of color always being good at something that involves physical movement. She portrays this in the movements exhibited in the trophies; each trophy always signifies a movement that depicts an individual being good at something.
“Is a trophy only for people’s success and not their efforts? Do people not deserve praise and admiration for at least trying to succeed in life? ”
Photo by Nalisha Kumarasinghe
