Using imagery of self-fabricated printing machines, my work deals with manufacturing aesthetics and mass production culture. The drawings look at the culture of mass production in and outside the art world. Utilizing ink and paper and the simplicity and immediacy of drawing, the work evaluates the process of producing objects and ideas within civilization.
The ability to mechanically reproduce art now makes it readily available to the masses. Although art reproduction has been around for a vast period of time, never before has it been so easily executed. These imitations feed the hunger for mass manufacturing that is tangible in the general public. With new advances in technology the potentiality for the mass public to attain products, art based or not, has increased exponentially because of progress in digital media and its duplication.
In contemplating this, I believe original artwork and the idea of singularity, has a distinct fetish attached to it. The ideal of an original is seemingly lost in a sea of reproductions. Unless the artist's original intention, this process reduces these art objects. The reduction of art to artificiality is diffusing the reality of the original. The work questions the boundaries of the original in opposition to the arbitrary manufactured object.
Jesse MacDonald