council chamber 

COUNCIL CHAMBER, 2017
1200 x 1800 mm
Oil on digital collage on board.

“Council chamber” contemplates the allure and visual history of war and masculinity, and reminds the viewer that perpetual violence (the barbaric love and violence of power) has become a ‘natural state’ in the 21st century. The ‘war machine’ has a gender, and it is male.

The central figure of the “Belvedere torso” (1st century AD Roman copy of a Greek bronze originally dating from the 2nd century BC sculpture in the Vatican Museum) is a portrait of Hercules, the most illustrious hero from Greek mythology, famous for his extraordinary strength, courage and masculinity. In the AD-Reflex version, the “Belvedere torso” of Hercules is placed in a mental asylum-type space, fenced with Second World War objects (such as oxygen tanks and masks that helped to shape the war), and the empty chair of Sigmund Freud in the background, serving as an ironical reminder of the destructive drives of the subconscious.

AD-Reflex combines technology (something that is used in warfare and social media to help produce new killing fields of immense barbarity) and the oil medium in a work that is distinctly ‘masculine’. In the age of tele-controlled warfare the hunt for more dramatic images drives the photographic enterprise, and is part of the ‘normality’ of a culture in which shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source of value.

“Council chamber” simultaneously alludes to a recent violent effort constructed by ISIS to produce and distribute highly visual material to appeal to disaffected people around the globe, wherein they used brutality against cultural artefacts, as a carefully considered ideology of cultural and religious purity.