The Essentia: A Solo Digital Arts Exhibition by Adam Strange

THE ESSENTIA

These visual artefacts are made in the "Age of Anxiety" where truth and lies are indistinguishable, issues and attitudes are binary, and the perils of conflict and intimacy result in the separation of the self from the physical. 

The images reflect our anxious world through a process of digital art, photomontage or image dubbing. These visual narratives are sojourns where time and memory, feelings and perspectives, manifest as physical places or situations showing the "Essentia" - the world as it really is.

We have a "digital self" which is irreconcilable with the natural world. The consequences are clear and profound - as we advance further into technology, we develop a greater lack of empathy for everything around us. We can no longer trust anything we see, hear or say and this is the root of our anxiety. As people retreat farther away from nature, the physical and psychological effects are the narratives I portray in my pictures. One example are objects or people being precariously tethered to one another. Humans are being transfigured without knowing what comes next. My mission is to document this entropic journey.

The digital artist's nature is to sample and be a Visual Sampler or a Visual Producer. I see the art making process as analogous to the Dub Producer making a record. The late artist/producer Lee's Scratch Perry, for example, both conducted studio musicians and also assembles, modifies and manipulates the sounds he used not just in real time, but also afterwards with overdubs, vocals and effects to colour the source material into his own musical vision.

There are also parallels between my approach and montage in film: both represent a way to portray multiple points of view or a journey through time or space that are then assembled into a unified image. I see stock photo sites as a mirror reflection of humanity. Some of the sampled images within the montage are curated or randomly selected and juxtaposed to arrive at a visual context in which the elements are transfigured. The artist no longer portrays a point of view, but elicits from the viewer the same response to the world that they had while making it.

All tools will liberate or enslave us. Photography is a tool of technology and the artist. The viewer's assumption that they are viewing a photograph is manipulated from the onset. The absence of colour is the absence of visual and emotional data. The removal of this data from the picture requires the viewer to immediately confront a discordant and binary world, then use light and shade as the primary language for interpreting the image's content, context and meaning.

The photographic image has immediate connotations we associate with recorded history, reality and truth. So I subvert those collective associations. This effect is similar to semantic satiation - we might call it's visual satiation. It is photographic, but it is not a photograph. Words and their meaning become disentangled from one another and conventions of perception regarding artefacts or historical documents can be easily destroyed by the context in which we see them. The term "photograph" no longer applies. However, if I was to say, "my images are photographs that I took with a camera," it would only reinforce the need to scrutinize the work and your perception further.