These photographs were taken in a hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina in November 2009, primarily as an observation of distorted images depicting pornography displayed on the TV screen. The work plays on the artifice and illusionary nature of material we receive via the screen and images reference the work of the artist Nam June Paik (1932-2006), whose work in the 1960s anticipated the significant role screens would play in peoples’ lives in the future through TV and the Internet. He invented the term electronic superhighway and one of his works is entitled Moon is the oldest TV, now the title of a documentary about his life by Amanda Kim, Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV. (Dogwoof JBS Arts and Curatorial 2023)
The work we are one is a newly developed concept bringing together the photographs with fragrance advertisement slogans sourced from the artist’s archive, but here the fragrance campaign images have been replaced with the more lurid if distorted imagery than the suggestive erotica of the various original fragrance campaign.
This material also references JG Ballard. In his introductory text to his 1995 Vintage edition of Crash, he writes,
Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an over-lit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography….
He continues…..
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass-merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen.
A draft version of the publication entitled we are one has been printed by Saal Digital: 21x28cms 62 page silk photo paper photobook. The publication will be available as print on demand in conjunction with limited edition framed prints.
Work in progress