'cream 5 - Looking through the Image' - Jarrad Martyn

The digital age exposes us to an endless stream of imagery ranging from the everyday to the global. Snapshots of man-made disasters are subsumed into our visual lexicon but the ease of accessibility and oversaturation of imagery can distort the original meaning and further detach us from the initial event.

 
Presented with only a snapshot of what may or may not have occurred in the image in question a palatable relationship to disaster is encouraged. Individual perception, collective memories and histories of events become inconsistent and unclear behind visual filters and layered information.
 
Within the reinterpretation of these images I deliberately emphasise the ambiguity of narrative to suggest that our potential response has already been measured. By contrasting the painting languages of figuration and abstraction I attempt to create spaces that are in a state of atmospheric flux as if caught in an in-between dimension of space and time.
The painterly manipulation of levels, planes, points and fields through distortion and layering, tests our relationship both collective and personal to events and histories. I hope to use the process of painting and imagery of disasters in a way that our relationship to what we might consider truth is brought into question.