‘Like’ exhibited a series of installation and photomedia works completed during a residency at Arteles Creative Center, Finland the year before. The centrepiece was a temporary site-specific installation – I decided to create my own blanket of ‘moss’. Created out of tweet, status and Instagram sized snippets of pre-virtual media (Newspapers and Magazines) I wove with string, a carpet of news, hopes, dreams and opinions into a fabric that mimics the sphagnum moss featured in the photographic series done in Finland. This body of work continues my fascination with translating the virtual world back into the real environment, and pays homage to the millions of contributions made to online social networking platforms daily.
On the walls surrounding the installation hung my ‘Moss Stencil’ series. The work came as a response to the lush forests surrounding the residency in Hämeenkyrö and continued exploring my fascination with virtual spaces in an embodied and figurative state. By carving phrases and symbols of our virtual life into the wilderness, the pieces acted as a kind of anti-street-art, it diverges in that the work is a removal of material in the environment, rather than an addition. While the work was in a public environment, it stands in stark contrast the urban setting that characterises the street-art genera. The rural setting of the pieces sought to parody the semi-rhetorical nature of offering contributions to social networking sites. If a tweet falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
This work was presented at 319 Scholes Gallery, Brooklyn, NYC between the 16th-17th of February 2013
