Notes on New Britannia

Notes on New Britannia New Britannia: Reinventing British Iconography is an exhibition of ten works, on display from 12th October 2015 at Roast Restaurant in Borough Market. In line with Roast's commitment to reinventing British cuisine, the show brings together classical and contemporary icons in a series of painted collages, exploring the rich syncretism of ideas and images in Britain today. It seeks to describe a natural rhythm of regeneration and decay, in which symbols and people both participate, at ever greater velocities.

As an American artist, my perspective is fundamentally one of an outsider, which may contribute to a liberated application of otherwise loaded material. Inevitably, I project stories about myself onto each painting, but by merging two or more found images, any official meaning or messaging is sublimated. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, New Britannia is unburdened by any drive toward authenticity, which could hinder or contaminate the images in their own right. I am merely observing and re-presenting the visual exports of Britain.

An ode to how we receive and filter images, not what they purport, New Britannia relates to Hito Steyerl's In Defense of the Poor Image, describing image movement and degradation in the digital age. I am fascinated by how images we consume stick in our subconscious minds and surface in dreams, or circulate in creative acts. Banal, oversaturating imagery carries immense consequences in visualising culture. When it appears next to catastrophic imagery, it implicates insensitive archiving systems and what role they play in determining memory.

Each painting of New Britannia departs from a digital mashup. I start by collecting online imagery (an old photograph, album cover or artwork, etc.), affirming or contradicting status quo representations of Britishness. I then manipulate and juxtapose the images around a central concept. When two images collide, each one becomes something altogether different.

Meaning starts to emerge in lines and seams, like bridges in a literary plot. I transfer the composite image to a canvas, warping it within the classical confines of painting, to validate all imagery equally in its power to shape perceptions. The self-reflexive picture points discreetly to a network of forces and assumptions at play underneath.

1. Modern Love A shield of stained glass, Modern Love paints religion as a defensive façade. Imagery is pulled from a window in Southwark Cathedral, where Puck, Nick Bottom and Titania from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream weld together in a cast-iron tangle. Shapeshifting, illusory beings and misplaced affections are themes of the allegorical play. In my painting, David Bowie is ensnared in the web, his alter ego from the 1973 album Aladdin Sane bleeding into that of Jareth the Goblin King from the 1986 fantasy film, Labyrinth. This latter reference frames Bowie's image as a demigod, in keeping with the idolatrous imagery of the window.

Modern Love is also the name of a track from Bowie's 1983 album, Let's Dance, referencing church. Gem tones and the androgynous Bowie point to an ever-increasing acceptance of gradated categories of sexuality and the rainbow as a symbol of gay pride.

2. Paper Doll For Paper Doll, I excerpted and repurposed parts of a 1994 gelatin silver print of Kate Moss by Glen Luchford. In the photograph, Moss adopts an odalisque pose in what appears to be a dingy New York hotel room. She floats on a body of water, which I painted while looking at a series of lithographs, Still Water (The River Thames, For Example) (1999), by conceptual artist Roni Horn. Horn's photography probes the continually morphing, richly textured surface of the Thames River. Placed above my interpretation of Still Water and below a pane of bubblegum pink, Moss's image in Paper Doll reflects an upending of high and low culture.

3. Vanitas Vanitas re-appropriates and mixes up the central motif of Tracey Emin's My Bed (1998), exploring the concept of exposure vis-Ă -vis Emin's relational aesthetic. For me, the magic of My Bed is in the activated space around the object, which shines a light on viewer expectations around public and private, formal and intimate space in the context of the museum. It is not in the littered bed or its cornucopia of feminine articles per se, but rather in the threat posed by these throwaway items to violate an otherwise sacrosanct setting.

During the Vietnam War, American soldiers overused antibiotics to avoid contracting gonorrhoea in the Asian brothels. A resistant strain developed in response, to this day compromising our immunity to the virus. My painting positions Emin's bed on a backdrop of sky-blue splotches and swirls, derived from a microscopic image of leukocytes attacking gonorrhoeal bacteria. It alludes to all types of exposure invisible to the naked eye, no less real than the unsavory ephemera strewn around the artist's bed.

Vanitas is a comment on how art has evolved, what constitutes art today. Various stylistic epochs are evoked, from Dada to synthetic Cubism to Surrealism, tying in Emin's work to a long historical lineage. The title of my work re-emphasises this continuity, harking back to the 17th-century Dutch genre of painting. Vanitas thus extracts aesthetic beauty from selfindulgent objects, while cementing conceptual art in a deep trajectory of practice.

4. Red Dot Red Dot riffs on J.M.W. Turner's mythologised flourish of Helvoetsluys, The City Of Utrecht, 64, Going To Sea (1832), for which the painter added a red blob (ultimately he turned it into a buoy) to accentuate his work, appearing next to John Constable's ruddy Opening of Waterloo Bridge at The Royal Academy exhibition of 1832. At the same time, Red Dot reinterprets Yinka Shonibare's Boy on a Globe sculpture, placing the figure (whose head seems to be lost in the clouds) in a seascape, to evoke the expression, "the world is your oyster". This clichĂŠd turn of phrase mirrors the convention of painting to inject dashes of colour or the human figure in order to attract viewers' attention.

5. Meat Your Maker Meat Your Maker depicts a human being metamorphosing into a piece of meat. While ostensibly dark, I conceptualised the painting as a symbol of channeled rage, inspired by Roast's initiative of rehabilitating youth offenders by giving them employment in kitchens. It owes a stylistic debt to Francis Bacon but borrows its subject matter from Goya's still life, Nature morte avec tranches de saumon (1812). Meant to evoke acoustic distortion, Meat Your Maker pays homage to the album cover of The Clash's 1979 London Calling, immortalising Paul Simonon smashing his Fender Precision against the stage of The Palladium in New York.

Although the music of The Clash became emblematic of punk rock rebellion, the group are seen in retrospect to have been manufactured, a commercial boy band.

6. Queen Queen evokes a photograph of Freddie Mercury, enrobed and holding up a crown triumphantly, at Queen’s last performance in 1986. By 1987, the public disclosure of Mercury's AIDS diagnosis had superceded his musical legacy in tabloid press, chronicling his rapidly expiring body. Mercury's ravaged image betrays a malignant hysteria around around celebrity sparing not even England's Matriarch, both consecrated and desecrated in turn, as a sacred repository of history and tourist trap.

7. Shoot The title of Shoot is an ode to Chris Burden's eponymous 1971 performance piece, in which the artist had a friend fire a bullet into his arm. In the context of the Vietnam War, Burden is quoted in explanation for his action, "wanting to know what it felt like". For me, his work faces head-on the violence we normalise every day, in reconciling graphic media imagery.

I recycled Shoot's figurative aspect from a poster for Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film, BlowUp, based on the life of David Bailey in Swinging London. In the movie, a fashion photographer unwittingly captures a murder on film. The term "shoot" thus acquires a double meaning. In the theatre of the fashion studio, one imagines the activation of his camera shutter lifting a model's spirit from her body, as she is instantly reduced to a still publicity image. Blow-Up implicates female objectification like Burden's Shoot does collective apathy. Both point to the postmodern concept of "death to the subject".

The plume of smoke in Shoot, the painting, is inspired by an aerial photograph of the Buncefield oil depot explosion, which transpired in Hertfordshire late 2005. Despite the

environmental impact of the fire, which sent flames hundreds of feet into the sky and smoke drifting for miles, Buncefield caused zero fatalities, and this is represented by the silver lining on the cloud. The term "blow-up" thus connotes a static doll and a chemical reaction.

8. Birds This work is a tribute to Steve McCurry's Pigeon feeding near blue mosque (2001), taken in Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan, where the photographer has travelled since 1979. The original picture is striking on formal and conceptual levels, pigeons and burqa-clad figure interwoven in skeins of bell-shaped continuity. Swooping wings carve calligraphic flourishes into the sky, and the figure fused with her environment lets a pigeon perch upon her head.

The white dove is a symbol of peace and purity. Unhindered by gravity, it flies freely. By contrast, the figure in the painting is statuesque, as if soldered to the gold-tinted ground. Birds focusses on the haunting, ominous quality of her fully enshrouded figure, not least by its title, an allusion to the Alfred Hitchcock film. Pigeons march ad infinitum into the horizon line, melting into one another as forms do in the Expressionist paintings of Edvard Munch. A sense of enclosure is enhanced by tight vertical cropping, dramatically reducing the scope of the original landscape image.

Most of all, Birds visualises the point of view of the cloaked female. The effect of the blurry doves imagines what it might be like to peer through her quotidian partition of fabric. While evocative of heat haze, this treatment of restricted visibility also transports us to a rainier clime.

9. Alice in Acid House Alice in Acid House is two images, entangled and warped and beyond recognition: an albumen silver print from glass negative of Alice Liddell as "The Beggar Maid", from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's 1842 poem of the same name, and David Hockney's Astray (2009). Alice Liddell, who inspired Lewis Carroll's literary classics Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1872), wears torn clothing in the photograph, taken by Carroll in 1858. The supernaturally hued landscape of Hockney, as it depicts a forest clearing while evoking, deliberately or not, an ashtray (its severed tree trunks like charred cigarette butts), gives new meaning to the expression "trail blazing" and makes a fitting backdrop to Alice's phantasmagorical meanderings.

Acid house, developed by DJs from the Chicago rave scene, spread like wildfire throughout the UK in the mid-1980s. Generated by primitive electronic instruments such as the synthesizer, sequencer and drum machine, the musical subgenre is characterised by a shrill, metallic squeeking or "squelch" sound, produced by a DJ's variant modulating of bass frequencies, lending "movement" to the bass line. Acid house had its own kinetic visual style, comprised of fluorescent "tribal" patterns, vibrating in the black lighted clubs of the underground movement.

Alice's ripped dress and coquettish gaze in the photographic source for my painting have fanned a suspicion in viewers centuries on as to whether Carroll harboured a paedophiliac desire for his subject. Likewise, controversy surrounds Carroll's fairytale narrative, as he is rumoured to have taken LSD (or lysergic acid, as it existed in his time) while writing his stories for Alice Liddell. Alice in Wonderland has hence become a trademark of seductive psychedelic environments.

Alice in Acid House is my vision of Alice's world transposed to a video game or digital environment, such as acid house. From a meta level, an etymology of the moniker given to acid house holds that the term acid was a slang word for stealing and referred to the genre's habit of liberally incorporating copyright tracks. Regardless, both Carroll's Alice and acid house have become steeped in an iconology of LSD (a.k.a. "acid"). The hallucinogenic substance was used by club goers to enhance a trancelike state while listening to the repetitive beats, so it doubly inflects the music.

10. Fresh Ness Fresh Ness is a tongue-in-cheek representation of the friction between Scottish Nationalism and Conservative UK government. In the foreground, Nessie, the fabled Loch Ness sea monster, bares golden fangs, floating beside her the diamond encrusted necklace of royalty.

Scotland can be seen to have "reared her head", with the rise of the SNP in the last election cycle. Though proponents of an independent Scotland might say she is tired of being served up on a platter.

Visible behind Nessie is an image fragment sourced from a Brixton photo blog, of an abandoned fishmonger's storefront. Residents of the neighbourhood have been forced to evacuate their homes and businesses, as a result of priorities aimed at maximising economic development. Wealthy investors have pushed out longstanding community members, who have resisted displacement in peaceful protests.

Fresh Ness represents one mode of undermining unsympathetic political structures: reappropriating symbols in order to dilute or redefine their meaning. Street cultures have often incorporated flashy jewellery, divesting it of a specific association. Set next to "fresh" in big colourful letters, Nessie's diamonds appear more like "rocks", and context sidelines history.

Symbols are important, not least because they can signal imbalances of power.