Continuing the series: Fake Phony Reality, my current work speculates on a role in contemporary visual culture for a political strategy, initially synonymous with US Presidents Nixon, Reagan & Bush - based on the proposal that: "perception is reality" (Lee Attwater). I.e. if you can make people believe in something – it will become real, regardless of facts.
I search aimlessly, but with calculated intent – looking for scenes and images with a seductive aesthetic syntax, uncategorisable meaning or the implication of equivocacy, and preferably all three together.
The motivation is to question authenticity in a period dominated by electronic mediation, surprise, assumed widespread derealisation and correlative dissonance. The pursuit is driven by the addictive desires - for visual satisfaction and control of the exponential reality that technology, events and memory now combine to offer.
The clash of 2 different processes - i.e. rephotographs taken from a screen, or photographs taken directly in my surroundings is tactical & aims to create a foil or alternative to the ubiquity of polarised ‘groupthink’ and viral normopathic authorities. There’s no hierarchy of subject matter. Images include: war & military hardware, disasters, human / technical and material object breakdowns, planes and boats – and people, both famous, unknown and anonymous. The process drives the look. The camera has become an editing machine – by crystallising a response to what I see.
Any similarity in the imagery to real places or people is purely coincidental and not intended – it’s all made up.
