Pure Evil Solo Show 2 , 108 Leonard St , Shoreditch , London. October
11-15 a cynical attempt to tie in with this weeks FRIEZE art fair
and upcoming shows :
Pure Evil Solo Show 3 , FakeSpace gallery, Beijing, China. 17 November to 16th December
Pure Evil Show , LUCY* gallery, Antwerp, Belgium. 20 December to 12 January
"I have made 12 screenprinted canvasses that are each about 1.5m wide of an image I saw in the newspaper about 2 months ago that hit me HARD...the mangled wreckage is terrifying and the thought of there being humans inside that wreckage is horrific... I wanted to find a way of processing that and looking into it, and I thought very hard about why I couldnt stop looking at it... and then I decided to do something about it...
By mass manufacturing an image and repeating images again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again we are desensetised to the HORROR of the image... We see images of violence on TV and in newspapers every single day and over time we just stop caring about it, because its our way of dealing with things... If we see a picture of a dead civilian lying in some foreign street we think its awful, but after a while its just ANOTHER image of a dead person... 9/11 was shocking when it happened and it still is, but over time it becomes a part of the past and our memories of that day fade a little , like a photograph fades ... There are images of Princess Diana in the paper everyday now and we can watch documentaries with footage of the terrible crash, but I think the more we are bombarded by those images we just end up filtering them out...
I just stretched one of the canvasses today and I had to sit down and really look at the image for a long time... Its a shocking image of a once powerful expensive car that has been pulverised, and its shocking because we know that peoples lives ended in that vehicle... I want people to look at it up close and really think about what it means...
People might hate this image and hate me for doing it and I respect their opinions but I am determined to be challenging and take risks and not to take the safest path ."