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JOHN NILAND
For some time now I have been collecting scraps of information, discarded
print items which I find on the pavement while I am walking here and there.
I began picking up these scrap pieces of information and pasting them
into notebooks. I have many notebooks of this abandoned information that
have now become a reference system for design.
This recently took a new turn when I decided to extend this practice into
documenting with my digital camera the detritus of consumer culture. My
initial investigations uncovered how this is woven into the natural surroundings
we live in. Materials find their way into the fabric of the natural environment.
As the 2003 investigation widened I became interested in the way consumer
materials are a catalyst for combustion and how the resultant disintegration
of materials takes many stages over time. DETRITUS is a further development
of the 2001 series. This series explores how consumer culture has become
collaged into the fabric of the natural environment.
The works I developed for the first DISTILLATION show 2001 were collaged
works from found and collected print material mounted on recycled cardboard.
I worked as Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg; on a continuous canvas, cut
and paste techniques, as a poet from everday commercial promotional images.
With this work I was interested in underlying interpretations of the gestalt
of the work as a result of a re-arrangement of the media. It was mant
to challenge the viewier to create concepts not based in traditional methodologies
of art practice but to realise that their everyday experiences are coloured
by powerful communication techniques and contrubute to everday ideas and
dreams.
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