An ongoing series of collage made for the dictionary project.

My work revolves around picking up the trash and debris that is feelings, and rework them into something that’s worthwhile. A presentable melancholy, an accessible darkness.  It’s time to pick them apart and give them a new lease of life. Melancholia and it’s friends are like glitches. Remixes, edits and filters rework these glitches and help assimilate them into normality.

glitches.remixes.edits.filters

As a large part of my work derives from my participation in the virtual, digital space, I’m also looking at glitch art, and digital manipulation as ways of presenting my content. A glitch is defined as a “a short-lived fault in a system and often used to describe a transient fault that corrects itself, and is therefore difficult to troubleshoot.”. I’m treating this definition in a metaphorical manner in relation to the process of blogging and writing in journals. These accounts are my way of dealing with negativity and issues, and eventually they exist as evidence that indeed, “this too shall past”.

To quote Franz Kakfa “One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer and which in a general way are naturally believed, surmised, and admitted by you, but which you’ll unconsciously deny when it comes to the point of gaining hope or peace from such an admission. In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.”

Hence, I’d like to think of the issues I’ve blogged about as glitches, as transcient matters.

Digital manipulation had been a constant method of my art-making. In these series of collages, I’m combining real collages scanned from my physical journals, and reworking them digitally to create more layers of symbols and images. The addition of  the planets, for example, is an allusion to early Internet art, part lo-fi, part ephemera. I’ve also distorted certain parts of the images and increased the colour information drastically, creating highly saturated areas of colours. This produces a “glitched” effect and is also symbolic of the intensity and saturated nature of my journals and blog.

The whole process of digital manipulation in these collages began first with an image scanned from one of my journal.

Again, these whole idea of collaging, remixing and applying “glitches” to these images is a way to re-present melancholy, a performative way of acknowledging the temporal nature of these issues, and above all, a kind of celebration.

I will be adding text to accompany these collages.

That’s all I have for now.

#wip