Mr Kirk's Nightmare Painting

My current work is an interrogation of digitally derived imagery through the medium of paint. Provoked by the media representations surrounding the August riots, I sought to understand them by reflecting on personal memories, of youthful participation in the acid house parties of the 1980's and early 90's. Although very different in nature, both happenings were initiated by groups or collectives of young people, producing moral panic and political reaction. These paintings have been created by working from digitally reconfigured, internet broadcasts of old video footage and newspaper clippings that document the rave scene. By selecting images with a degree of ambiguity, or by overlaying my source material, I have attempted to create paintings which express an equivalent sense of animosity or excitement, illustrated by the riot imagery. Visually, the degradation of the image, caused by this continual replication and reformatting, is of great interest to me and something that I have attempted to convey through my work, whilst still retaining the qualities of the paint.