JAMES BURKE's Page

Website

www.JamesBurkeArt.com

College / University

Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London

Program

MA Fine Art

Graduation

20 September 2007

Member type

Artist

I am...

24 years old.
London based artist.
Graduated from the MA Fine Art program at Central Saint Martins (London) in 2007. Sold work to Bernard Jacobson Gallery (Cork Street).

About my artwork

Burke’s process begins with the ‘culling’ or appropriation of existing digital imagery found throughout the internet. Often sourced from alternative ‘neo-religious’ web pages and links, these ‘already’ mass replicated digital images expose the foundations of his key concerns and interests.

Hierarchical and authoritarian forms of power and ideology are instant within this ‘mechanical’ or ‘digital aesthetic portraiture’. Burke investigates the philosophical concerns of Carl Gustav Jung’s ‘Shadow’ and Foucault’s ‘Power-drive’ theories. “What is interesting, are not democratically elected leaders, but individuals who establish that power for themselves”. The artist breaks down, edits and manipulates these sourced images, through a systematic network of fabricated rules, and are executed within his restricted palette of colours. “Intense chromophobic tendencies add to the tension already built between the split surfaces of material and subject matter”.

These images are largely based on the structure of commercial and digital production and reproduction technologies, but aims to embrace both the abstract and representational nature of these deliberate systems, while also bringing to the foreground issues of authorship.

Within this selective and precise system of rules, the artist very nearly acts as ‘designer’, dealing with fundamental design notions of material, pattern, form, geometry, process, colour and often functionality itself.

Starting often from the point of ‘ultra-digital realism’, Burke manipulates his subjects through his archaic, repetitive and often obsessive systems of design. Although the subject matter and concerns of the artist remain with these fundamental issues of ideology, hierarchy, power and authorship, the processes vary greatly.

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