I'm interested in the dynamic between popular culture and counterculture, along with digital age realities and unrealities. My art explores this from an intersection of queer, chronically ill, and working-class identities, in an attempt to celebrate a counterculture that speaks to those othered by institutional social normativity. I am very inspired by the way media consumption shapes the individual identity under neoliberal capitalism, and how this has evolved with an increasingly digital world.
Last year I was working with the idea of street art as a countercultural mechanism for bringing the suppressed internal world into the physical. I've previously created full-wall paste-ups and disseminated series of stickers around town in an attempt to apply these strategies, working with imagery of cartoon guts inspired by creepy-cute "menhera-kei" style comics I read growing up.
I intend to expand this practice, finding new ways to combine my physical/digital media work in installation to further highlight the apocalyptic digital age context I feel we're existing in. I'll probably keep a consistent work going on my T-wall, pasting up and ripping down throughout the year. I liked how that turned out when I did it for Practice last year. I also want to improve my digital illustration as well as level up my 3D and animation skills.
My ideas tend to evolve from my personal diary practice of collaging sketch, writing, and found/printed image. Through doing this over the summer break I've been developing an iconography informed by my formative experiences online, fringe sci-fi-esque conspiracy theories, and mass commodification. This year I intend to bring these ideas out of my tiny A5 sketchbook and onto my studio wall (and some walls in public, allegedly).
I want to continue to work with the layering of medias, as last year's paste-ups combined repeated illustrative work with painting directly onto the wall, creating an interesting contrast. By expanding my palette of media into 3D and photographic material I would like to create more visual confusion, emulating the overstimulation of media and advertising in the digital age.
I also want to use this year to refine some of my digital artmaking toolbox, and try to actually learn some of the video, image, and 3D software I've collected over the years. The formatting of my workbook is also an exercise in HTML, something that I hope to further utilise in my work as I love the nonlinear narrative potential it possesses.
I like to keep my choice of media affordable, most of it being the cheapest option from the cheapest shop. This feels conceptually relevant to me, as cheap art supplies often aren't too different beyond marketing. There's also probably something to be said about overconsumption in my repeated use of acrylic mediums and bleached copy paper, but before I go down the microplastic rabbithole, here's the list:
a freaky hectic laptop - 7 years old, insane specs, sounds like an airport
a tiny little wacom tablet - 11 years old, sratched to hell, my true soulmate
"adobe" photoshop - torrented in 2020, works like a charm, no bullshit new AI features
massey fujifilm printer - free, but autonomous and doesn't like me
a stack of cartridge paper - in the aforementioned printer
a stack of sticker paper - 20c/p at LookSharp, 50c/p at Warehouse Stationery
PVA glue - multiple litres, cheapest option
white acrylic - large quantity, poor quality
coloured acrylics - small quantities, medium quality
Kmart paint pens - $12 for 24. art consumerism holy grail
see reference page for precedents & references to come!