a play: exhibition photos

 

 

 

So this is the exhibition I put together for my second semester of third year. It was so nice to have such tiny artworks. I literally just prestiked them to the walls and when I took them down I carried them home in a little box :')

 

I have never been so proud of my work though. During the second semester of last year I actually put a clear mind into my project and for once what I made actually felt right. It made sense to me. It felt like an essay that I had been theorizing and creating for four months, a story with a narrative, had finally concluded and fulfilled it's storytelling purpose.

 

 I have never felt that before. There is usually always a gaping hole in my work, an opportunity side-stepped and ignored in the hopes that I won't feel its presence by the end, but I always do. This time wasn't like that. I think being clean for 6 months now has helped me work better. I feel like I have to make something with a true purpose, otherwise there really is no point to making anything at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Artist statement thing:

Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women

“That feed is your poem”

 

 

Connection through storytelling has evolved with machines. As we develop transhuman limbs, our language changes too. There are new archetypes in our myths and there are new heroes in the stories. Britney Spears shifts through time from personifying a naïve teen popstar, to a dangerous mother, to a tragic heroine, all within twenty years of digital discourse. The current potency of parasocial relationships between my generation’s middle to upper class peoples and the Influencers of all kinds is indescribable. I feel their stories in my story, their lives parallel and metamorphise mine, just as Sisyphus does for those who bother to read the classics.

Celebrities curate and cultivate their public persona through the same image-making tools that we hold in our own hands. There is a disturbing façade of equality to this access. Every human being becomes a site of aesthetic and political gambling on behalf of a machine learning algorithm that develops your ideal comfort zone online. It sweeps your narrative of humanity together into one colourful, glistening page of sensations. This flattening of spatial and temporal distance between people blurs digital and corporeal worlds into one.

I have attempted to put together a network of images that speak to this larger sense of Meaning that I have developed as a result of my lifetime access to computer technology.

I have payed direct attention to the inherent self-evaluation that these cards perform. Where I feel an image is a universal archetype for one thing, it can represent the opposite to a phone-weilder with a life outside of my own. The powerful appearance of Elon Musk at the Met Gala as an inversion of a priest, where his missionary-like colonisation of Mars is not intentionally inferred but, to me, bleeds from his smug grimace, is to others just a witty commentary on his God-like status as a powerful business man.

 

I followed a gut instinct of painting images that felt recurring, endless, and obvious to me alone. I hope to capture the desperation I feel at having no capacity to fully articulate this pattern that I swear I see. I think it follows some sort of logical order, has rules, an outcome. But it doesn’t.