Eddy Loukil exposes and classifies a kind of smear artists encounter in the entertainment industry as they glare up from the bottom of a disparaging hierarchy in his video aptly titled “EXPLOITATION“. It beckons questioning towards such structure and how these partners in a project end up working over each other rather than beside one another, with one ultimate executive lording over the crushing frenzy. Among such hierarchies, the emphasis is placed heavily upon production value rather than intrinsic quality which is a rather unfortunate reality that Loukil reveals in his digital narrative.
He goes on to walk viewers through the second act where orthodox families gather in a theater to eagerly consume the manufactured and assembled product. On-screen, the film is an apparition of an original idea that has subsequently molded into a mutation of sorts, pumped by lifeblood composed of greed and the dollars of those who seek further financial gain as a return for their investment. Engaging with the humdrum of artificial and superficial genre, the families are unknowingly perpetuating the success of a scheme that seeks to exploit. Their unknown infringement is spotlighted in the center of the seats, focus on the climate of the clientele these mass productions are targeted towards.
The artists who are essential and frontline to weaving an idea into reality, become muffled and hemmed into a creative detainment, straining under the pressure to merely produce the same conforming work over and over again. In a personal aside about this project, Loukil explains how he has faced such exploitation in the entertainment when he worked as a 3D artist, burdened with “no free-will, little creative input, and barely any credit.” The way in which he expresses the aforementioned concepts is through graphically depicting a fictional artist’s sculptures of carved concrete in several different settings like warehouses and art galleries as they progressively become refined.
One could practically feel the denoting weight of the sculptures, their implications, through the outward aesthetic of brutalist atmosphere. The sculptures are dark grey, bearing sharp edges that carry emotional expression to create the narrative Loukil strives to publicize. The concrete texture lends itself to conveying his ideas so explicitly. This can be seen in a shot where a victim of the systematic exploitation is being crushed by one of the many cogs working to keep such a monstrous machine going, with their head pushed against the ground at the weighty hands of the aggressor- cracks begin to form across the face of the victim.
Loukil’s “EXPLOITATION” is a ruminative and potent piece, part of a larger project meant to speak upon the ways in which varying degrees of aggression is enacted by one social group onto another. The 3D artist adroitly tinkers with traditional and digital approaches to art in this video as well as instill his original methodology of artistic omnipotence, melding the roles of director, modeller, and sculptor into a single entity. Eddy Loukil delivers an outstanding performance, creatively provoking audiences with robust imagery and tact in “EXPLOITATION.”
