We are obsessed with the thought that everything is falling apart, of society at the edge of a precipe, that we're all going to hell in a handcart. Systems not fit for purpose, moral decay, Trump, extinction rebellion, end of Western civilisation, global armaggedon, population explosion, population collapse. It's the end of the world as we know it.
We talk about the intrusion of social media or the revolution of the internet, yet the telephone was really the first appliance that shattered the barrier between the exterior and the interior. It was the first technology that breached the beaches of our private, personal space. Yet each year it becomes more and more obsolete; all around us from major cities to villages in the middle of nowehere, the cables and posts of a redundant technology, signs and signifiers of a disappearing time.
Just like the two main characters in Dostoevsky’s The Double, this collection comments on the never-ending sibling rivalry between artistic painting and photography; the influence and attacks, the attempts to discredit and invalidate of two distinct media that both strive to put what's out there, what we see, into a square frame.
A collection of images from movies of the decade whose middle name was excess. Helicopters in pursuit of articulated trucks, female assassins in pencil skirts, Stallone, Arnie, Bruckenheimer, monoculturual swagger, unreconstructed masculinity, guns and ammo, lipstick and shoulder pads, Jungian archetypes, Lacanial Real, primal, primitive symbols. It had the lot in Dolby Surround Sound. Turned up to 11.
No-one looks at me. No-one sees the real me. I have been abused and rejected my entire life. Spat at, kicked and pissed on. Even now you look away. And why? Because I'm different? I have symmetry and colour, hypnotic geometry, gold-leaf, Klimtian form, meditative swirls and patterns. But I am worthy. I am beautiful and I deserve love. I will be seen.
From Angela Lansbury to Columbo, CSI to Death in Paradise, nothing says relaxing early evening Sunday TV like on of the most violent crimes an individual can commit, and if witnessed or experienced first hand, a deeply traumatising event.
