COLLAPSING NEW PEOPLE

ARTIST TALK

Sunday 22 October, 2.00 pm

Rather than the artist explaining his working practice and what the work is about, this 'talk' will use a critical response model. It will start with those attending taking time to view the work (10 – 15 minutes) developing their own views and thoughts about the work and then responding to the work on display. Given the chance to view the work and draw conclusions for themselves the participants will be invited to share these views with each other and the artist who will be present. From this basis of a shared experience an objective and critical approach to the exhibition will be developed and shared with others and the artist's own experience of the images and working practices.

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There is a crisis in human capital, the social, the economy and the environment and as a result there is a crisis what it takes to be human. This crisis is driven by the fragmentation of our identity and who or what we think we are. “Collapsing New People” is a series of digital collage portrait images that examine the form, nature and content of that crisis. These are portraits that are shorn of the cartesian tropes of representation, social status, kudos and binary notions of self. These are rejected as outdated and representative of a colonial, racialised, patriarchal, and socio-political series of hierarchies framed withing a capitalist paradigm. This is one that is riven violence and no longer fit for purpose.

If we are to negate these Cartesian notions of self it is understood that identity itself needs to be reframed, reappropriated and represented in ways we have yet to have the facility to comprehend. It is about placing our notions of self upon a sensorial platform, where identity is a living experience, felt rather than seen. My work uses the open grammar of collage and the potential of the digital to provide opportunities to express identity as a relational sense of self. It investigates the inherent qualities of collage and its ability to order new relationships of meaning from matter within a Cartesian value system and works towards the creation of a likeness based upon sensation, a sensorial likeness.