Developing a visual language that engages with contemporary dissent and critical opinion

In this project I have visually explored ideas of duplicity and obfuscation as being indicative of both contemporary politics and the mass media, and of their mutually parasitic/symbiotic relationship to each other. The main vehicle for this investigation is the found image, specifically that of the political figure, and of the figure's relationship to the representational methodologies of the mass media. These figures are employed in various configurations to construct 'political landscape'. The work is about how politics and the development of political meaning occur within the mass media, and in turn how political figures manipulate their public image through, or are manipulated by, the mass media. This process indicates complicity by the mass audience (the public) in the perpetuation of these contrivances. Politicians candidly describe this duplicitous operation as the 'public perception' of issues and personas. The larger significance of this manipulation of 'public perception' is that we overlook, forgive and forget of our own (western culture's) criminal transgressions and punish the transgressions of the 'other', in often brutal and over-zealous ways. I construct 'political landscape' tied to a particular time, place, and/or issue, employing the political figure as a signifier of this landscape. These 'landscapes' are generated through the use of images and methodologies sourced from the mass media.