POOR CONNECTION

LOCATION

DOPENESS ART LAB, TAIPEI, TAIWAN

DATE:

October. 2020

In these historic and unchartered times the illusion of presence is both a blessing and a curse. Our friends and family have become handheld personalities in a virtual world of communication. Through the likes of Face Time, Zoom and Instagram Live, it has fast become a world full of visual stimulation yet gradually lacking in physical interaction, as it ebbs away, fading like a fond memory. Whether by choice or by necessity, we increasingly share our lives with one another through the lens of a camera, often masked by filters and hindered by connectivity, we’ve become omnipresent, multi tasking creatures, bathing in the white light of the screen, slowly loosing site of the actual here and now. Poor Connection is my vision of a not so distant future, or maybe even our present, a world in which the 'digital relationship’ has come to be the new default; a world where technology defines the limits of our connection with one another and where face to face communication has become a scarce commodity. Identities become masked, emotions kept at a safe distance, like the passing of two ships in the night.

The idea of being “virtually there” is a theme I have carried throughout the majority of the work in this show. Though the characters I’ve chosen to depict share their space on canvas, their bond’s to each other are ultimately disrupted or flawed by technology. Rather than acting as a window to wider communication, technology has restricted what may otherwise have seemed intimate or romantic. As it stands, physically isolated from one another, we ourselves have little choice but to follow in the same footsteps for now, but my hope is that this new body of work will come to act as a memento to the physicality that we have not yet lost site of and can still be saved.