Grant Stevens’ work explores how we understand, construct and communicate our subjectivities and interpersonal relationships, especially how the ‘languages’ of our screen realities shape our constructions of self and disseminations of meaning.
From film, television and music videos to social-networking sites and niche advertising, our age is saturated with mediated interfaces for self-reflection, self-construction and inter-personal exchange. The pervasiveness of mediated interactions has led to a "culture of distraction" (Sherry Turkle, "Alone Together") where instant and constant ‘connections’ increasingly define our private and public lives (and indeed, the blurring of the two). For some of us, there is a contradiction: the more we connect electronically, the more we feel alone, disconnected, overwhelmed and anxious.
Perhaps as a mass coping mechanism, this "culture of distraction" has been accompanied by the unfettered rise of ironic cultural production. The new online forums of creative exchange (Youtube, Facebook, et al) are filled with parodies of popular culture, caustic monologues and self-conscious replies. Apathy reigns, and possibilities for expressions of sincerity and authenticity seem to be eroded with every Like and LOL.
How can we continue to seek and find moments of clarity, insight, affect and poetry within the haze? Perhaps it as Don DeLillo says in his first novel, "Americana", "There is substance to most clichés". Stevens deliberately appropriates and manipulates the clichés and conventions of screen-based languages to tease out the personal desires, anxieties and pathologies that emerge through our lived experiences of this contemporary condition, creating works that critique our sometimes-self-conscious and apathetic sensibilities so that we may thoughtfully engage with and understand our affective experiences.
For his Art Month exhibition with gbk, Stevens continues to engage with these ideas, questioning where we find solitude and guidance in a world seemingly bound to the mechanisms of popular culture.
Image: © Grant Stevens, Gallery Barry Keldoulis
