Details:

1920 x 1344 pixels

30 FPS

Original Art Work

About the Artist:

Bryan Robertson

Bryan Robertson grew up in the inner city of St. Louis, Missouri, in the Midwest region of the United States. He was fortunate to study the Russian language in primary school and had the chance to visit and stay with a family in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. This experience in post-Soviet Ukraine began his interest in researching authoritarian social structures. Additionally, Robertson was introduced to a shared sense of humanity and a love for visual language while being welcomed into a community half of a world away and visiting an art school in Zhytomyr.

Besides these experiences, his grandparents' escape from the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia and Poland influenced his thinking about the world. Robertson says, "from a young age, I have been writing, painting, drawing, and experimenting with methods of communication that aim to understand the human experience mainly for myself. After going to graduate school, I began to think about communicating with a larger audience and the individual’s relationship to the whole. For me, we live in a New Media Age, a time where the image is more important than words, and that is why I am a visual artist."

Robertson holds an MFA in painting and drawing with distinction from the University of Washington, Seattle. He has received several university and non-profit grants to support his research and held solo exhibitions in commercial and non-profit spaces. He has presented at national conferences, including the College Art Association, Foundations in Art: Theory and Education, SECAC, and the New Media Caucus. His recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition of moving images at the CICA Museum in Seoul, South Korea, and experimental sound and video at the Long Island Museum of Contemporary Art. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of 2-D visual arts at Yavapai College in the mountains of central Arizona between Phoenix and the Grand Canyon.

Description:

Cubism and Dada are the foundations of my artistic thought. I combine the concepts of observing reality from multiple angles with the insertion of chance and absurdity. A sensation of dislocation results in my photomontages and digital media as symbols of popular culture and metaphors depict the social fractures occurring from the proliferation of access to information. Much like the Cubists and Dada a century ago who challenged authority, I aim to question the function of power in the New Media Age.

Contemporary political philosopher Martin Gurri describes the New Media Age as the Fifth Wave of information over humanity and highlights the expansion of data occurring in waves. For example, the invention of writing consolidated political power in a singular entity capable of deciphering that writing. The printing press led to printed books and pamphlets, equal access, the reformation, the American and French Revolutions, and modern science. Mass media made propaganda regimes, a consolidation of access to information, and the totalitarian politics of the 20th and 21st centuries. In the New Media Age, images are more important than words for the first time in our history; this amplifies cultural fractures and reinterprets convention.

In my piece titled “New Media,’ the viewer is subjected to a cluster of eyeballs with information shards emanating from the center of the composition. The eyes are ambiguous and subjective to the viewer, but they release a sense of paranoia and schizophrenia as a never-ending stream of information is released. As the data flows, specific shards become redacted and censored from view, as authority strikes back at the public’s access to information, threatening the legitimacy of contemporary power structures.

This work is available for collectors as a physical sublimation dye print on aluminum at the size of 42” x 28”

Website: Museum.io