It’s a good day today. I’m off to London for the launch of ‘The State We’re In’ - a new season of digital and print billboard works commissioned by The Gallery and Artichoke.
From the website…
“11 timely and powerful artworks respond to the theme ‘The State We’re In’ on thousands of billboards and outdoor digital screens across the four nations of the UK.. The exhibition ’The State We’re In’ is open in towns and cities, large and small, across our four nations, freely available to millions of people for 4 weeks: from London to Glasgow to Manchester, Southampton and Cardiff. Look out for the artworks on high-streets, bus stops, cinemas and billboards near you!”
I’m genuinely excited by this. The organisation have been great to work with, the project and its content couldn’t be more timely, and making work for the public realm in this way is always fun, rewarding, and unknown. 11 artists have been commissioned for this season of the project and you can see/read about all of them and their work HERE.
In terms of my own work, this is it…
…and as far as my thinking goes, the statement I wrote for the project website says it all…
“Our society and culture increasingly values economic profit and personal advancement above all else; an individualistic and capitalist-driven world-view, that can only lead to division and catastrophe. It is no-longer conjecture that businesses conspire to make profit from activities long-since known to be toxic to the world. ‘Profit and self above all else’, on one level, acts as a critical observation of this problem. It could also be taken as a mantra for the American Psycho generation, reading as something of an objectivist tenet. We live in a time of real-life Bond villains; super-rich, super-powerful, individuals, living on private islands with enough personal wealth to end all the world’s inequalities, but waking up every day and choosing not to. If that’s not a contemporary equivalent of holding the world to ransom, I’m unsure what is.”
If you see any of the billboards on your travels, please do snap a picture and send it to me as these are going to be on hundreds of sites across the UK, so I won’t even see a fraction of them.