"The World on Steroids"

This large interactive piece continues my exploration of the 3 ½” by 2” magazine collage cut out, which mimics the dimension of an iPhone screen. The process for creating these screens is simply to draw a grid on the cover of any magazine and cut through the magazine. Each magazine then produces hundreds of screens, most of which are rejected, the best of which are accidental, choice compositions that are created by the chance orientation of the grid on to the particular magazine’s layout, design, and subject matter.
This work a large two-sided canvas titled "The World on Steroids" has a front papered with hundreds of "screens", is faceted, has a relief surface sculpted in papier-mâché and is painted with acrylic. It is constructed as two hinged panels designed to be installed on a wall covering a large enough opening for a person to pass through. On the back are tubes, stalactites and organic openings that tunnel through to the front. There is a ball cradle that holds a papier-mâché sphere that can be dropped into the tubes only to exit out on to the gallery floor.
The front imagery depicts concentric phone bezels ad infinitum and introduces a new series of works, loosely titled my "infinity" series that continue my ongoing explorations into our relationship with technology. The phone bezel is a distinctive frame with its two wide ends designed to reduce unintentional inputs on a touch screen and rounded corners designed to facilitate smooth handling. While technology pursues miniaturization and devices strive to become organic extensions of our corporeal being, my canvas expands to envelope the viewer and becomes a literal place to enter or pass through. The reverse imagery depicts endless code, painted graffiti style, onto an undulating muscular surface. All this suggests something between a cave and the internal anatomy of a living being, withn a scenario of physical engagement with the viewer as a way to bring higher orders of experience into a strange yet familiar concrete plane.
 
Kenny Cole
October 2018