I really never thought I could be an artist in the art world sense of it.
Picturing Barbara Kruger
I didn't know anything about art worlds. I never had gone to museums.
I had to get a job.
So, I left school when I was around nineteen and just started working as an editorial designer at magazines.
I would basically look at all the photographs that came in
and I didn't have the text from the copywriters yet, so I would just place text over the photographs
and said "abcde" and they would write to my design.
And what I realized, is that my job as a designer pretty quickly morphed into my work as an artist.
divinity of the masterpiece
We don't need another hero
Your gaze hits the side of ma face Your comfort is my silence
Think twice
Your moments of joy have the precision of military strategy.
We have received orders not to move
Girl Don't die for love
We will no longer be seen and not heard
We are not what we seem
I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to tell us and remind us
where we've come from and where we're going.
They have powers and pleasures, and desires, and disgusts.
I'm very interested in the everyday.
I love the everyday and its repetitions, its comforts.
Its... The events that make me nuts.
I like the moments between events.
I see myself within this pleasurable, yet brutal culture.
But I think that like most artists I try to create commentary.
You know, I've always said I have short attention span
which connects me to digital culture.
I went online and I found 500 images based on certain stylistics of my work.
And I constructed a work using those images.
Non of which were made by me.
The way my still images have traveled online
in various forms done by myself and other people is satisfying and amusing to me.
Obey
Supreme
Don't be a jerk
I curated a show at the Museum of Modern Art which I called Picturing "Greatness".
But the word "greatness" was in quotes.
There were two texts and they were on the wall in the middle of the room
surrounded by images of artists.
And the text basically focused on the arbitrariness of fame and prominence.
There are so many visual practitioners whose work we don't know
and the reason is sometimes brutally arbitrage.
I resist great claims made for my work.
One of the great joys of being able to project your subjectivity
into an image
or an object,
or a building
means you don't have to be there physically.
You don't have to be the face of your work.