Nineteen Sixty Nine

Full description

Background
Thinkers informing the research include Isabelle Graw, David Joselit, T. J. Clark and J. G. Ballard.
Via this work I ask how mass media images might be related to single outcome images such as a painting (in Graw’s terms ‘a form of production of signs that is experienced as a highly personalized semiotic activity’). I question and reflect this theory through processing the relationships between well-known broadly disseminated images (such as the 1969 moon landing) and the personally directed subjectively nuanced experience of making a painting in the 21st Century. I ask how science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) influenced histories (i.e.: NASA moon landings) might be incorporated into humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) based approaches (i.e.: painting). The work, and any necessary writing, resides in this threshold, uncomfortably.
Contribution
Why paint the moon? Like the moon, this painting doesn’t emit its own light - it reflects. Can the work reflect in other ways: The work contributes to ways of reflecting on mass media’s impact on the human psyche. The work disrupts, fractures, reflects 
and re-contextualises mass-printed images promoting and celebrating lunar explorations (STEM) via subjective (HASS) based methods. The collaged and painted result shows a disrupted, fragmented and partially reconstituted image of the moon - is this partially reconstituted gesture-laden work that reveals its own construction a reflection of a human psyche?
Significance
Senior curator Lisa Sullivan selected the work for inclusion in Geelong Gallery’s Moon exhibition. This exhibition surveyed various ways that artists have constructed images of the moon. The work was exhibited in direct relation to Michael Light (collage, US), William Kentridge (film, SA) and Susan Norrie (painting, Aus.). The Moon received 15,972 visitors and gained extensive newspaper and radio coverage.
The work has since been acquired by Geelong Gallery.