WHEN : 28th – 30th March
WHERE : QUT Creative Industries Precinct
Daniel McKewen’s artwork explores the intersection between the roles of the artist and the fan, as they engage with popular culture.
His video installations appropriate and reconfigure elements from mass media to explore how our interactions with pop culture can allow us to ‘make sense’ of our own social experience.
McKewen’s work is particularly interested in the tension between the apparently contradictory attitudes of complicity and criticality present in the approaches of both artists and fans. His practice-led research forms a kind of auto-ethnographic study – exploring his own creative impulses arising out of an affective response to pop cultural artefacts; and examining the creative and critical potential of the ‘fannish’ and digital processes used. These recontextualisations aim to shift familiar imagery into different terrains of spatial and durational engagement, through scrutinising the pixellated seams of construction in the ‘surface’ of pop culture.
The artworks that form the main outcomes of McKewen’s research project function as evidence of this contested relationship with pop culture. By recreating and addressing this simultaneously complicit and critical approach to mass mediated culture he explores his own complicated attitudes towards it. In doing so, attempting to resolve this ambivalence felt about popular culture and present another voice in the contemporary dialogues about the creative and critical possibilities of art and fandom.
Time
Wednesday 28 March 4:00-8:00pm
Thursday 29 March 2:00-6:00pm
Friday 30 March 2:00-6:00pm
Image: Daniel McKewen – ‘every face on Vanity Fair’s Hollywood covers 1995-2008’ 2010 / Courtesy of the artist
