Original artwork description:

This image was painted over a period of two months during my stay in Falmouth, Cornwall and formed part of my MA show at Falmouth University.

The idea stemmed from my research into the way we are bombarded by many images in today's world and the contradictions evident from it. The constant advertising world and the use of women to sell product, in themselves becoming part of the product through the use of their image; how sex and sexuality is used to sell products; the conflicts that arise through the wanting of products [in this case the riots that had happened in Britain in 2011, with young people raiding shops for consumer products, during a time of recession]; the mixing of old advertising and new advertising to highlight what, in my opinion, little has changed in the advertising world over the last 50 years during times of equality and feminism; the play with words and language to highlight the differences between the Middle East and the West [as shown through the image of the Palestinian dad carrying his child, while the Kenner advert showing an American dad being the horse for his son, placing the title of the 'toy' on top of the knee of the Palestinian dad highlighting what is usually the horse's saddle when one is a child.

I placed images from different times together, without controlling too much their placement, allowing an element of synchronicity and chance to come into play in the work, as well as to see how much of my subconscious decisions ruled my conscious decision making processes. During this painting's construction I had in mind Richard Hamilton's famous pop art piece 'Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?' [which I had the chance to see at the Reina Sophia Gallery in Madrid in July 2014] and decided to further the homagé to Richard's piece through the work's title.

The layering corresponds to ideas at the time which have been further developed over the last two years. My belief at the time was the idea how our minds overlay images and how the mind copes with the saturation and bombardment of images from our memories, the high street, the Internet or from the television/ media. I have been persuing this line of inquiry via other countries and their historical development and recently a scientific journal has published that our mind groups similar events/ images together, managing memory - which is something I am currently looking into and something I had begun thinking about from 2012 from a common logic point-of-view, coming through the way a computer defrags and re-groups/ organises data in a hardrive [which granted was a primative viewpoint but one that set me going in this direction].

This painting summed up research I was doing at Falmouth University and the era during 2001 to 2012.

Materials used:

Oil Paint

Tags:

#oil #collage #painting #contemporary #pop art #paint #conflict #political #richard hamilton #images #adam #homage #recession #coloufull #polemical #grose #regime change