inkyscreen
presents 'PICNIC' an exhibition of narrative fine art screen prints
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This series of twelve images, originally hand drawn in ink on paper, have been re-imaged as limited edition silk screen prints.
Each image is in an edition of ten. The images (57x41 cm) are printed on Somerset Soft White Velvet (76x56cm) printmaking paper by the master screen printer Robert Clarke a.k.a Inkflood: robert@inkflood.co.uk. |
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The original images have been selected from a collection of drawings made over a period of more than ten years.
The subject matter alludes to the relations between science, culture, technology, history, war and nature. There are consistent and recurrent elements to most of these drawings. The atomic pixel like dots, the woven and convoluted patterns reminiscent of Celtic knots and Islamic arabesques. These geometric networks are also similar to the spiralling trajectories generated in particle accelerators when subatomic particles are smashed together spitting out vortical tracks suggesting a dynamic abstract sub structure underpinning 'objective' reality. |
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1:34 PM - Feb 21, 2016
Mark Zuckerburg strides down the aisle past his audience, blindfolded to his presence by the Virtual Reality headsets they're all wearing. An image reflecting the condition of a visionary global entrepreneur stalking the darkness invisible to his own followers in a virtual reality leaking out of the headset and the screen, spilling onto and mediating into the commercial surfaces of constructed physical reality, diluting the distinction between the real and the fake. |
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A nostalgic childhood memory of a song; The 'Teddy Bears Picnic' from a bygone era.
A time that many appear to seek to return to in the struggle to renounce the perceived threat of a world being squeezed by malevolent bureaucratic forces. A desire to return to a digitally free uncomplicated utopia by 'Taking Back Control', perhaps, as we sink ever deeper into the tangled machinery of the tightening globalised corporate grasp of endless spreadsheets and overwhelming data processing. |
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A screenplay in development 'Once Upon a Time in the Seventeenth Century' aka 'Scumbag'.
A historical political thriller of splintered identity and fractured loyalties. A conspiracy of mirrors and moles struggling for control of an emergent empire. |
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'Migration' is currently associated with the too often forced displacement of populations from their homelands.
A revolution in seafaring technology in the 16th Century and beyond generated an explosion in what was, in some degree, a privileged migration as a strategy of force, killing, enslaving and displacing indigenous populations. Many of these displaced and their descendents migrating in turn, often to the territories of the migrants that initiated their dislocation. |
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Deployed by the United States Air Force the B One strategic nuclear bomber also known
as 'Bone' is a component of what was called deterrence in Cold War and post Cold War language. Military technology as well as being functionally effective is also visually predatory. Though some nuanced degree of deliberately expressed aggression is probably factored in, visual aggression is primarily a consequence of it's functionality. |
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During the Balkan Wars, in the former Yugoslavia, Apache ground attack helicopters were used
by American forces to mitigate ethnic cleansing. There was a bitter sense of irony, at the time, that the United States military had named a machine used to protect threatened populations after an earlier population that had suffered forced displacement within United States borders a century or so earlier. |
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Babylon was historically a city state in ancient Mesopotamia. At it's height it was the largest city on the planet.
In various mythologies it is associated with linguistic and cultural fracturing, decadence and corruption. For some cultures it has become a metaphor for modern consumer capitalism. My motivation for portraying Earth in this fashion is an attempt to render the simultaneous, stunning beauty, filth and glorious fungus of the Anthropocene against an apocalyptic backdrop of space junk amid writhing electronic and material waste constituting the rotting hulk of cyberspace. |
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Deep Throat was the title of a 1972 pornography film and also the pseudonym given to a whistle-blower who triggered
the Watergate Scandal that eventually led to the downfall of President Richard Nixon. The term was referenced again in 2017 when Anthony Scaramucci was 'deep throated' as he was blocked from an appointment as a financial advisor to Donald Trump's Presidency. |
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A rhizome is a an integrated subterranean root system consisting of multiple nodes
interconnected horizontally in an organic network of bio channels. Nodes bud vertically to form shoots that generate and feed plants growing above ground. The late 20th Century philosophers Deleuze and Guattari promoted the concept to describe a wide range of processes and systems like computer, transport, and cultural networks. As a former plumber and heating engineer I have identified hot water and central heating systems as an example, combining water, electrical and gas networks building an assemblage, a construct greater than it's summary of parts. |
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The inspiration for this drawing is the way gravitationally collapsing clouds of gas and dust form planetary systems orbiting stars,
like our own Solar System, an ordered self organising complexity then emerging from chaos. An inherent anti-entropic process at work. |
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The Selfish Gene, a book written by Richard Dawkins. A misunderstood and misinterpreted title.
The premise being that genes are molecules that have evolved to survive by self replication. Genes do not necessarily drive selfish behaviour in the organisms that they direct, determine and influence. Indeed they can drive altruistic behaviour through influencing actions that serve to protect other organisms that share similar copies of themselves. As such an individual's boundaries become complexly intertwined with their shared environment that can include other apparently separate organisms. |
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This image of a skull set against a cruciform made from a floppy B29.
The Boeing B29 Superfortress was the type of World War Two bomber that was used to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the two catastrophic events that brought an end to the War. |
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There is a virtual exhibtion of this collection available in the link below: