Interested in the fate of the canonised artistic, scientific and journalistic images and their potential to embody contemporary meanings, for in in my new series of collages titled Mellow Apocalypse, I have used images from open source collections of art museums, scientific institutions and various image banks whose archives may be considered iconic testimonies of the present and the past.

The collages are grounded in my search for syntactic visual language connections in the images pertaining to various periods, media and domains of the visual culture. The collages make use of the ideas and technical codes established in the visual communication that transcend the borderlines of ages, media and cultures. The codes that are so deeply engrained in culture that they are used without thinking and are understood through pre-existing schemas in the recipients’ minds.

Although the decoding of images depends on the recipients’ interests, values, convictions and wishes, yet the globalised world of the visual culture is oversaturated with simulacra where the feminine and the masculine, the other, the desirable, the repulsive and the beautiful is depicted through the use of similar ideas and technical codes in different epochs and various media. These syntactic connections across various periods of visual culture and different media are traceable in persons’ postures and gestures, in colour stage designs and similar outlines of objects and architecture. The technical execution of the collages is based in the image post-processing software algorithms, letting them overtake the accuracy and precision of image depiction. Thus, the digital post-processing technological features become a part of the collages’ notional and technical code.

Archival pigment ink prints on rag paper, mounted on dibond, framed in custom shaped frames. 100 x 100cm (2021)