In
the new body of work created for this exhibition, entitled “WELCOME HOME”,
I used the domestic architecture of HAUS to explore media influence
and cultural pollution in
the contemporary home.
I am interested in the confusion and anxiety generated by streams
of marketing and media messages that pour into our private lives
through the wire. Politics, news, entertainment, religion, and
commerce have become inexplicably intertwined. How does this
domestic assault affect us as individuals and as a culture? Has
media replaced our genuine emotions and motivations with scripted
jargon and images? How does this phenomenon perpetuate itself
and drive our economy? Where are we headed?
These are questions that I have asked myself during more than
a decade of commercial media work, political activism, and artistic
exploration.
In
the three installations created for the living room, dining
room, and hallway at HAUS, I have remixed audiovisual
fragments gleaned from film, television and the internet. By
reconfiguring familiar content in provocative sequences, I hope
to jar the viewer into an analytical mode. To me, the results
are funny, vile, frightening, idiosyncratic, overwhelming,
and
oddly attractive.
The
flickering and fragmented imagery emitted from the fireplace
in the living
room romances the notion of TV as “the modern
hearth.” In the dining room, text selected from hundreds
of actual SPAM emails (which I personally received) is whispered
by synthetic voices generated from multiple computers, disturbing
listeners like intimate, electronic, prank phone calls. An additional aspect
of this piece is the derivation of the term “SPAM” from
Hormel Food's trademarked meat product, and their
response to this slang usage. The private rooms in the hallway
dramatize the impact of Hollywood films on our personal relationships – reducing
cinematic domestic arguments to pulsating light and sound behind
closed doors, setting up a voyeuristic situation in which viewers
are not sure what is authentic emotion and what is artifice.
My
influences are eclectic, from Dadaist poetry to Fluxus to
"culture jamming" to contemporary commercial media. Populist
source material collaged into various formats continues to inform
my practice. I use montage as a way to juxtapose unaltered elements,
creating new streams of dialectical questions. I am interested
in pushing readymade media out of the box into a poetic environmental
experience.
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