Your Garden is Looking a Mess Could You Please Tidy it up
Multiple layers of Billboarding and material found in urban environments are used in my work. Décollage of the billboards are then stuck down showing glimpses of brightly coloured adverts once shown, with layering of posters overlapping and revealing the materials underneath ostensibly creating a semiabstract view of something that is almost graspable. The use of screen printing and its physical sculpture increase the visual complexity.
My work is less concerned with a commentary on consumerism but referential in content to the unobtainable, involving erosion of spaces emerging within built up areas and relevant to the show –‘your garden is looking mess could you please tidy it up!’
Rupert Ackroyd, Peter Blake, Leon Chew, Nicky Coutts, Greg Day, David Gates, Sarah Hardacre, Gerard Hemsworth, Marie-Jeanne Hoffner, Dick Jewell, Peter Kennard, Gerhard Lang, Bruce McLean, Niall Monroe, Jack Newling, Dermot O’Brien, Sian Pile, Rudolf Reiber, Richard Rhys, Daniel James Wilkinson.
‘Your Garden…’ takes as its starting point, an icon of twentieth-century design: the Marlboro flip-top cigarette box, first introduced by Philip Morris in 1955, which in its current predicament faces a progressively imageless future. The aim of the exhibition is to explore ‘print’ in this period of re-invention, dismantling and possible cultural renewal.
The Marlboro pack has a long history of visual appropriation, but as logos and advertising are increasingly removed, will an activity fueled by visual desire survive without the image?
Historically, magazines, record sleeves, CD cases, book covers and other printed visual ephemera acted as a coded visual display of how we thought. They also related to us on a human scale. As the decline of the printed visual landscape continues and we become increasingly consumed by a sanitized digital (and in many cases virtual) one, how will the individual define him or herself in this shifting environment?
Books are being standardized by kindles, postcards, greetings cards and letters by text and email and increasingly billboards by video screens. How we identify with communication and mass printed material has irrevocably shifted.
‘Your Garden…’ aims to explores ‘print’ in its widest sense, the culturally loaded flip top cigarette packet acts as a springboard for work that explores notions of printed material in a shifting and visually unpredictable landscape, where mass communication and its printed offspring increasingly becomes less about the physical and more about the virtual.
Curated by Andrew Curtis
