Superflat: Process collection 2015-2016

In a hybrid-cultural globalized world, I am often over whelmed by the noise & volumes of different digital imagery every day - accessible at any given time and existing in every part of my life.

My superflat collection was created by and to reflect my desire to make art in a world where the ability to consume any kind of art, from any culture, in any part of the world is available to anyone and in response to brief given to me about the writings of Richard Serra.

I think my response was to naturally create my own version of popular culture to draw attention to the dominance of the media, entertainment and consumption of it - thinking about what is art or what is illustration or what is graffiti now in this time.

Regarding the school work I needed the work to be of pure process of making art and what I used to create it. Allowing the work to remain ambiguous but still teach the viewer about how it operates. Having no signifiers, conventions or importance placed on anything specific as part of the process. The idea of this is to force the viewer to confront their own need to place meaning to the figures or shapes the eye is reading - when the reality is there is no meaning at all, it is just literally residue of process. Lines, shapes, dots, purely random markings.

Another part of my particular process is to allow the art to make itself, and then the result every time be completely original. Completely autonomous in making and then using one or two of the aesthetic conventions I have been exploring with colour and weight and the requirement that each figure needs to remain "flat" in the end.

While exploring with my mediums, I was really attracted to the idea of emphasizing outlines and flat areas of colour. I like strong line work. I like cartoons in all it's flatness. I like typography, design and clean cut areas. I like clean print, and I really enjoy the surprise of every print, even if it's not a perfect one. To me after studying the advanced diploma in my aesthetic, what became most important was the feeling of flatness, how colour can become line and how colour has weight, and how that changes the surface it is marked on.

Referencing back to process artists like Richard Serra, Jackson Pollock - by doing actions of dripping, rolling, printing, pressing, cutting & layering. The conventions used in this process are utilized to create a figure/ground shift & destruction/reconstruction of figure and ground. Cutting away any dominant negative space or loud space, I cut out everything that could be seen as a solid shape and leaving only the contour and the lines to give you what remains which is pure figure.

Once placed by on the support, it activates the support to become the ground and then, becomes one. With the use of ambiguous shapes and using the lines to act as colour, the figure begins to cut into the ground and flatten the image. This is to force the viewer to not be able to tell the difference between them once the works are removed from the place of making on the horizontal and placed on to the support (the wall it was displayed on in exhibit) making the wall also part of the work. This enables the work to become "super flat".