Media & Viewpoints

It is no secret that media reporting on almost anything always has a bias, agenda or a vision. I am not against media reporting, on the contrary, I think it is great that in the world we live in today we have an awareness of what is happening across the globe. I associate the media with having opinions (social, political, economic etc) on reporting. In some cases this is site-specific to the place that is the subject or to the place that is the source. One area where this opinion is very powerfull and effective is in mass culture.

I feel that as a person of British/Egyptian Nationality, I am aware of two very different 'worlds' these are not actually 'worlds' apart and I am sure that there exist very similar circumstantial extremes of wealth and poverty, health and illness, safety and crime etc. In the context of my work, these viewpoints that I am personally aware of I envisage having a spatial consequence. I imagine this might manifest itself as a physical positioning of the viewer as in anamorphic projection perhaps or this might present as a simple visual effect as in the viewing of the columns in St Peter's in Rome. I am interested in the idea of having to look for meaning within spatial experiences which implies finding only what the viewer wants to find. Through movement the viewer has more exposure and more opportunity to explore the work.

This painting is a good illustration. I saw it recently myself and it made me think.

Title Madonna
Artist Slavador Dali
Date 1958
Photograph Amir Daoud

'Madonna is one of several works Dalí made after 1941 that uses classical imagery as the basis for Surrealist invention. Here, he paints two different simultaneous subjects with a profusion of gray and pink dots: a Madonna and Child based on Raphael's Sistine Madonna (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, after 1513), and a large ear, whose ridged interior surface is defined by the presence of these two figures. Each motif is designed to come into focus at a different distance. At close range, the painting looks completely abstract; from about six feet away, it reveals the Madonna and Child; and from fifty feet, it is what the artist called "the ear of an angel." To the left of the main images is a trompe-l'oeil detail of a red cherry suspended on a string from a torn and folded piece of paper; its shadow is cast onto another piece of paper bearing the signature of the artist.'

Source www.metmuseum.org

To summarise, my work will strive to embody ideas surrounding the following.
Media representation
Re-appropriation and Recycling
Lighting design
Hierarchy
Consumption, Consumerism and Capitalism