Joseph Christie Evans

The digital prints, painting and thinking that I have made, derived from a body of digitally collaged elements that I made in quarantine. These digital collages evolved into an online exhibition that I created as a way of trying to send my work into a digital landscape after being influenced by other galleries that did so during this time as well. I got bored of painting images inspired from isolation on canvas so I started painting on some of the images that I made within this online presence. The canvas prints that came from this are from various, randomised sources including stock images, advertising, and instagram photos. The digitally collaged elements is a randomised array of imagery, trying to collate some of the elements that are composed from popular digitally composed image categories. The way in which Michael Majerus created clean works of popular media culture, collaged elements of paint and other media, was where i got the inspiration for some of my ways of thinking as well. A fluidity of an old medium in trying to refresh its purpose for myself in the same way that the images I was experiencing, collating and editing were being refreshed and remade. Walter Benjamin talks of the mechanical process of this type of digital creation “by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic.” For me I interpret it as  being able to create and conform the digital and the painting to make something that is interesting in its own form of magical, hybrid creationism.