The Concilation

My past twenty years of professional practice explores a number of fundamental questions around the way in which new technologies shift cultural understandings of the human body and its environments. This piece, ‘The Conciliation’, samples from the 1840 painting of the same name, by Benjamin Duterrau into a new mashup of forms and meanings. This painting within a painting remixes Tasmanian colonial superstition with current questions concerning Aboriginal and White relations, video-gaming violence and America’s/Australia’s Oxycodone epidemic. For me, the use of the stencil and airbrush has a heavy advertising and propagandistic reference where I try to expand this practice through computer and video-game graphics. My new media approach to image production allows me to problematise the original image with a mediated form. I intend for my visual arrangements to become abstracted which then have the potential to create dissensual linkages between different forms.