Spectral Surveillance
This body of work uses a surreal, uncanny and fantastical colour palette to create imagined landscapes, reminiscent of figurative scenes and tableaus of the renaissance and baroque periods. I have sourced images by mining through digital mapping platforms, such as google street view, and created a ‘pastiche’ of figures, interacting with their surroundings, each other and the viewer. By spending time to sculpt the bodies of these figures with paint, I am engaging with questions of the body in surveilled space and questions of privacy. Referencing ideas of phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), I have aimed to recreate the phenomena of each of the subjects' respective temporalities, (through colour and brushstroke) in a space that they do not belong to.
By spending a lot of time on google earth and google street view, I have sourced imagery of figures and bodies. Some unaware that they are being recorded in the moment, and some poignantly aware, even interacting with the camera, or the ‘god-like’ viewer. I then collage these bodies into a new space and a new time.
I believe that painting this digitally sourced imagery on a large scale makes it complicated, and sophisticated, emphasising tangible and material qualities, and the existence of these bodies within time and space.
