“Real life is a rumour”- Caroline Polachek, Hopedrunk Everasking
Real life has been replaced by its duplicates - images. In the information age, the mass proliferation and reproduction of images has left us with a falsified reality. Images, ever circulating, simulate and supplant the real - which now ceases to exist. As media saturates reality, what we are left with is a fragmented and illusory hyperreality. Our perception of this world is informed by images, which are constructions. To interpret it all, sometimes feels like looking through mist.
And yet this is the universal mortal question, that has existed since flames first danced on the walls of caves, and the projected shadows revealed the multiplicitous nature of perception, and of reality, that can be echoed, distorted and copied.
There is no one way to interpret the sum of all earthly information, as it is entirely self determined. Yet the walls between its echoes, contortions and duplications have become even narrower amongst the tide of data and media.
Luigi Ghirri professed that it is our duty to be discerning and critical of our perceptions, to see beyond the general “order of appearances”, to look awry at our fabricated world.
By contemplating images of images, a “mirrored reckoning” occurs, undermining the deceitful nature of these decoys of the real. This is the function of painting.
Painting has been seized to “deconstruct the illusions of the present”. The material construction of a static image, in turn makes apparent the counterfeit nature of our reality.
In this series, each painting is a game of revealing and lending, withholding and destroying information. They exist on a pendulum, between obscured and clarified.
The act of viewing art requires us to lift the veil from expected representation, to decipher visual information, to look closer at the appearance of things.
They are objects in physical space, the surface engaging with a haptic and mimetic practice. The paintings do not attempt to evade their own materiality, and their constructed nature.
Yet they reference and imitate the nature of digital images, and screens - overexposed, blurred, fragmented and degraded. The degraded, poor image -
“The poor image is a copy in motion” Hito Steyerl.
The circulating image loses clarity as it is endlessly copied, reproduced and proliferated. This is the condition of our increasingly blurred life. But, these images, the paintings, are stagnant.
‘Signs’ is a reference to three different phenomena:
1. Signs, as in simulacrum - simulated reality.
2. Cosmic messages. Signs of other life, superstitions. Conspiracy videos and grainy images offering depictions of extraterrestrial or paranormal possibilities.
3. Physical, signposted material. Billboards, advertisements. Proliferated imagery.
The idea to make sign-like structures, out of metal, came after lots of driving around the country. There are signs everywhere, permeating. But in remote places, and vast, void spaces, this is where one would drive past roadside signs that have been left to outlive their relevance. Static images, stagnant in the passage of time, their purpose and material decaying. They remind me of paintings in the sense that they are inert and also enduring. They are like gravestones for the physical realm.
Paintings are signs- they fix, in material, and structure, information. Information is usually always pulsing, changing, multiplying and being lost. But here, it endures, in stillness and materiality.
The images in this series have originated from various and different positions in time and space, from various technologies, as is the anachronistic and non-linear nature of virtual media, where all is flattened.
Music videos, films, the news, printed matter, google earth, television, emails, viral videos and photographs. However, there is no randomness to the selection.
Naturally, the paintings revolve around themes of conspiracy, and also fantasy. Our inability to distinguish what is real life and what is its imposter. The paintings are about an attempt to materialise what is vaporous- not just information, but unknowingness. They are about the compulsion to clarify the fog around us.
“In this endless process of reproduction, we may measure the thickness of our own mirages” - Luigi Ghirri