The culmination of John Player’s MFA work presents a restrained and detached view of surveillance culture. Endless defense from an unknown but constant threat is unveiled in appropriated images from mass media, newspapers and archives found largely on the Internet. The imagery shares a kind of aesthetic of power and control, as well as a paradoxical inertia – an aesthetics of catastrophe that is now commonplace and even expected. Dominant culture’s obsession with speed and control is confronted with the slow read of painting; the banality and distraction of technology here challenged by painterly care.
The sparse, somewhat minimal work shows dual interior and exterior vantage points of surveillance infrastructure. There is a sense of a system’s internal mechanization and its external physical result. Mostly devoid of people, the emphasis appears to be on the faceless structure of defense and economy. This also points to the network at use in the politics of domination, or the banality of the bureaucratic system in place to administer and finance it. The invisibility and secrecy of entrenched security and mass surveillance informs the work and creates an environment of deception; moreover, the medium of painting adds its own deception. The alternate view of the observer questions who is watching whom; a surveillance of surveillance suggests a sampling of its own voyeuristic culture and implied dominance of the screen.
The idea of the mechanized eye is central to the work: drone warfare and autonomous systems of command and control at a distance, seemingly surgically precise, yet indiscriminately targeting the unknown in panoptical vantages become a mystified narrative. Whether in wide-open landscapes or cavernous bunkers, the threat of preventative and permanent war is apparent. Noting the uncanny relation to archaic 1980s defence technology, the escalation that ended the balance of power, the exhibition as a whole offers a psychologically tense feeling, suggesting an ominous moment of stasis in the progress of destruction. The work shows stark painterly shorthand, almost crafted with an awkward preciousness: the seductiveness of paint is rendered uncannily distressing in the unveiling of tools of power inherently immune to dissent.
Player’s painting slows down the visual of the digital real-time event and reveals deliberation and process. The confusion of unavoidable chaos invariably attached to the source material is erased. The remaining illusion, the repurposed image in yet another removed context develops a meaning devoid of encouraged imperial progress. The painted result is of temporal shift; with the image loop frozen, we are stuck with an illusion of broken technology.
Here, painting brings humanized understanding to the insidious climate of fear, control and militarization – humanity’s attraction to spectacle and war, domination and voyeurism is dissected while being captivated by the apparatus itself. Out of a personal need to question and resist the unrelenting political and economical war drive in media, technology and decision-making, Player disrupts the dehumanizing spectacle with critical reflection of this culture of speed, remaking the narrative and attaching resistance to the normalized way dominant culture views the world.
The Gallery thanks SODEC for its support.