Philippe Le Miere - 'ClickBait' Artist Statement
Philippe Le Miere gives us his Artist Statement for his recent exhibition 'Clickbait' at the Saatchi Other Art Fair:
Everyday we negotiate between conformity and creativity, wading through monotony to find moments of inspiration. Like you, I scrolled through never-ending feeds of film, imagery, music and politics… finding myself drowning in the millions of search results for “art”. That was until I rethought the data.
I have always been interested in the unconscious. For years I focused on dreams, recording and analysing the coded stories of my unconscious mind. Now, I find myself fixated with the collective unconscious, asking - what does my culture dream of? And big data, as a log of what we quietly click on, is my access point.
Like dreams themselves, my subjects are never straight-forward. I watch the light change on the digital landscape, then merge the most striking moments into surreal pop-culture dreamscapes. Accordingly, my titles gleam the most searchable hashtags and splay them out like mind maps of meaning.
In my paintings, there is a union between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. On the one side, subject matter is derived from conformity, while on the other, these icons are rendered unique. This marks the soul of my work. Forging an original voice using images that seem devoid of uniqueness, daring us to be different.
See Philippe Le Miere's entire collection here.