Invaders

Text by David Rodway

The portfolio "Invaders", of 1998, consists of a series of painted and mixed media works and digital photomontages, addressing our feelings of ambiguity, disorientation and turmoil about today's invasive consumer culture. Wit, humour and irony play a central role in these exhibits, exploring the way this culture is colonizing the minds of the young.
In these works, the recurrent motif of the mechanical doll is intended to function as a symbol expressing both the complicity of children in mass consumerism and their position as victims of it. The surrealist strategy of unexpected juxtapositions is used to evoke our present day confusion between reality and fantasy, fed by the intrusion and colonizing force of the media and advertising in our everyday lives. At a formal level this idea is echoed in the illusionistic interplay between abstract and figurative elements and artificial or digital and painted representation. Images of nightmare and playful innocence are interwoven as a metaphor, not only for the child's developing mindscape, but for society's discontents. These are intriguing works in terms of both formal invention and the imaginative use of subject matter.