painting    drawing    collage    video    printmaking    book art

Target: shape-shifting

A suite of works on paper and canvas inspired by the counter-intuitive concept of ‘Dazzle Camouflage’ which was employed on some allied shipping during the Great War, and more rarely, during WWII; not to offer concealment but to make it difficult for the enemy artillery to estimate the target’s range, speed, and heading.

Here the figure is partially concealed by a target pattern projected across a room. This simultaneously alters spatial cognition and yet signals a human presence by interpretation of the modified geometric pattern.

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At a less formal level, the concentric rings may also be interpreted as a sight or target The individual under surveillance; naked and vulnerable, whose every move within both public and private space is being monitored and recorded by the state apparatus. This is the terrain of Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four', a book which has proved central to my view of contemporary culture. The character is essentially a Winston Smith figure; a covert dissident within the society he finds himself a member of, but to which he does not belong.

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