@jackontheweb
Favourite song to play on repeat?
Country Girl by Boy Harsher
So firstly, how'd you get started as an artist?
Playing around with photoshop during high school, I became really obsessed with images and layering of text over multiple images. This has just led to my practice now, which is more or less the same.
Is there one discipline that you prefer over the other? Why?
Recently I have been making work about online identities and the idea of nonphysical embodiment. Although this is really image heavy, thinking about showing this work in a physical space often seems boring if I were to just print the images and hang them on a wall. I put a lot of thought into the materiality of my work, how it occupies space, how it feels, what physical properties it has. For this reason i’d say at the moment my work is sculptural.
Tell us about the Kudos show you just had?
I was just in a group show called SUPERVIS at Kudos Gallery, with incredible artists Elijah Innes and Gillian Kayrooz. The show treated the screen as a site of interfacing between embodied and represented identities. It ran from Feb 26 through till March 16.
For my work in the show I tried to imagine what the online body might look like in the real world. I used data peripheral to my own online existence (spam emails, targeted ads, geo-location data, Facebook messages etc.) as reference material to create a series of digital images gesturing towards an obfuscated sense of identity. I then worked to present these images as sculptural objects that could sit in the space. I used lycra, resin, silicone amongst other materials to make those sculptures.
I was really happy with the whole show, and the expanded sense of self portraiture between all the artists.
What is an artist you most admire that informs your practise?
I was really privileged to have Marian Tubbs as a tutor in first year, her aesthetic and practice was a huge influence on me. I remember she described her work once as an “expanded photography practice” or something like that which really stuck with me.
I’m also really obsessed with Pakui Hardware, a Lithuanian based artist duo who make incredible sculptures looking at the relationships between material, tech and body. Often their works consider the influence of technology on the human body and physical reality.
What audience does your work cater to?
I’d like to think that the work is accessible for everyone, even though it does rely on found images and cultures definitely most adjacent to youth experiences of the internet. I’m trying hard to not make the reference-heavy nature of my works discredit them for older (or less digitally present) people, because I don’t think the questions my work raises exclude those demographics.
What does the future hold for you? Any cool projects coming up that you're
excited about?
I have some work and writing included in the upcoming issue of Minimum Wage Magazine that compares computer Screen savers to decaying environmental landscapes.
I don’t have many solid art plans beyond that, I’m taking some time to mature my work before applying for more shows I think. It’s important to stop and critique what i’m doing fairly often as I don’t want my work to seem apathetic or apolitical.
In the mean time i’m working as a gallery assistant at Cement Fondu, as well as a photo technician at a photo lab in Newtown, as well as studying my Bachelor of Fine Arts at UNSW.
