Lee Gainer
Monday, 1 June 2009
Work from Group Therapy.
“We have a tendency to seek out others with similar interests and ideas. Within these found groups, we can discover a place to belong, to be ourselves. When these ideas or interests require a certain uniform, whether for safety reasons or a consistent visual appearance, it serves to underscore our sense of belonging and our perceived acceptance within the group.”
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General statement:
“My art explores culturally accepted and media supported perceptions.
Using found and created imagery, I visually analyze social rules, hidden messages, the psychology behind these ideas and beliefs, and how they alter our behavior. I collect thousands of images from my own photographs, catalogs, magazines, newspapers, the internet and other media and regard them as raw data to be examined. From this archive, I will select imagery based on the perception I wish to explore and use them to initiate a visual experiment. By removing the image from its context and deconstructing its aspects, I can focus on a single characteristic of its message and evaluate it. While I begin each experiment with a result in mind, I have found that the data does not always produce what is expected. I find this work to be stimulating and rewarding. Every answer leads to a new question. My work is a response to a continuous challenge to decipher the bombardment of modern imagery. “