A totem is a spirit being, sacred object, or symbol that serves as an emblem of a group of people, such as a family, clan, lineage, or tribe.

Early anthropologists and ethnologists like James George Frazer, Alfred Cort Haddon, John Ferguson McLennan and W. H. R. Rivers identified totemism as a … (read more)

A totem is a spirit being, sacred object, or symbol that serves as an emblem of a group of people, such as a family, clan, lineage, or tribe.

Early anthropologists and ethnologists like James George Frazer, Alfred Cort Haddon, John Ferguson McLennan and W. H. R. Rivers identified totemism as a shared practice across indigenous groups in unconnected parts of the world, typically reflecting a stage of human development.

In 1938, the structural functionalist anthropologist A. P. Elkin wrote about how to understand totems. His typologies of totemism included forms and functions.

As artists we identify as one of those “forms”, a tribe, and by creating this artistic object we fulfilled one of the “functions”, conception of multiple meanings.

Totem 1

The creation of totem 1 began with the traditional and physical aspect of art, painting and sculpture. First we created an oil painting of an Aztec calendar and a painting of typical folk patterns that served as wrapping layers for the 3D elements in our animation. We proceeded to create clay sculptures which represented our style and temperament in our ‘art tribe’. Other traditional elements from Mexican culture were scanned and transformed into 3D objects and rendered as part of the final animation.

The combination of physical and digital aspects of the art in this creation is our totem documenting the stage of human development and where we are as artists in 2022.