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“Shock value for its own sake isn’t interesting, if it’s even possible to conjure it post-Information Age. However, I do look to inject a certain level of visual immediacy within the work to engage the viewer in a dialogue around the nature of imaging making. This links back to the idea of the primal or carnal. Food, sex, and death are staple subjects within art history but are also categorised as our most primitive drives. In contrast, art itself is often viewed as almost synonymous with developed civilisation, as the antithesis of our primal nature. This separation of human behaviour strikes me as an illusion, so an uneasy relationship between art and nature runs through the work. I set out to use the language of image-making iconoclastically; to deconstruct itself.

The images hopefully work to seduce the viewer with what they may normally find objectionable; blurring the line between observation and voyeurism. Dead animals, morally ambiguous scenes of sex and gluttony; they are looking to trigger a morbid curiosity and a tension between desires and internalised ideals. This is where the environment, lighting, and installation of the work comes into play. The lighting, both within the image, and of the image itself (they are often spot lit in dark rooms), directs the viewer where to look, encouraging a peep-show-like spectacle of voyeurism.

The triggering of uncanniness within the work is used to shed some light on the illusory nature of our relationship with imagery. I’m drawn to digital mediums because they lend themselves well to dealing with ideas around illusion, artifice, and the re-presentation of nature within art; they serve as tools within the work to address our vulnerability to the power of images.”

Check out the work of Theo Ellison in an interview I did for Floor Magazine. Theo creates images which are simultaneously unsettling and alluring. Find out more by reading the full interview here;

https://www.floorrmagazine.com/issue-16/theo-ellison

Top image: After Zuburan ©Theo Ellison

Read more artist interviews here; https://contemporaryartprojects.art.blog/category/interviews/

Museums are great places to learn about the history of art. You can learn about painting, photography, sculpture and Molotov cocktail bomb making! Yes, Molotov cocktail bomb making! It won’t be on the adult course guide but if you pop over to the Tate website, you’ll find Cildo Meireles’s ‘Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project’.

The ‘Coca-Cola Project’ is made up of a row of three modified Coca-Cola bottles filled with varying amounts of cola inside them. The bottles have been altered with subversive messages including, “Yankees Go Home!”, “Which is the place of the work of art?” and instructions for making Molotov cocktail bombs added to them.

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1948, Meireles made this work in response to the dictatorship running the country during the 1970’s. Many artists and protestors were living under threat of violence and censorship. The bottles are the remnants of a socio-political, artistic action or performance which encouraged citizens to share the subversive messages printed on the bottles. As the owner drank the cola the subversive messages became less visible on the transparent bottle.

The work can be seen on the Tate website https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/meireles-insertions-into-ideological-circuits-coca-cola-project-t12328 and in Pinacoteca, São Paulo, Brazil.

Interview with artist Theo Ellison for @floorrmagazine

Contemporary Art Classics: ‘Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project’

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