Jesus-is-aware-of-his-fate-but-is-unable-to-do-anything-about-it-as-he-rides-past-on-a-dinosaur.

Here is a bad piece of writing by a bad man:

Jesus-is-aware-of-his-fate-but-is-unable-to-do-anything-about-it-as-he-rides-past-on-a-dinosaur.


I am quite reversed towards defining what it is exactly I do. I make work in a pleasant freefall, picking up and put down differing modes of execution and means of distribution. For the most part, my work, be it drawn, written, sculpted, sung or videoed, is an exploration of the moment when the formal, rigours, conceptual system breaks down and becomes the ridiculous and tragic.

The encounter between perceived truths of the past and the facts of the present greatly interests me. I place myself in a bizarre battleground, where Jesus Christ rides an Apatosaurus with improbable neck muscles and everything is degraded in huge pixels for clarity.

Figures of the once great and fierce beasts, the Dromaeosauridae family (Raptors), sit awkwardly in my pieces, becoming sprawls on the wall and floor. Their limbs, still clawed and sharp, have no use, unable to hunt or support their own weight. It would seem that these monsters have been cloned 65 million years after they died; but something has gone wrong in the lab and their faces are now anonymous. They are pathetic gangly creatures, only partially recognisable, a bastardised cousin of their true ancient form, they are kings brought down to the level of circus freaks.

This changing of character – the systematic to the playful, the empowered to the trapped, the comedic to the tragic, comes from the “…what a piece of work is a man.” speech in Hamlet. The prince describes wonderfully how beautiful and poetic the earth, sky and human race are, only to say that he has no love of them. This quote is used through pop-culture, but finds its most important placement in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Hide and Q; where Captain Picard remarks on the speech:

“…what hamlet may say with irony, I say with conviction.”

The idea that something that is said in irony can be taken at face value, even when the initial context is known, still amazes me. I marvel at this audacity, and hope that it finds its way into the execution of my work.

My understanding of role of the viewer also has a quaint dualism. I feel inclined to give hints to there being something more than the formal aspects of my work (this being most visible in the A3 and A4 SHAP, where print-offs are used to create a fractured narrative), but at the same time I envy the viewer for being able to see my work with a pluralism that I shall never have as its creator. My work, therefore, embraces images, such as architectural forms, but gives little or no clue to how these are to be understood. Are these buildings in the making, or deserted ruins? I give the viewer a god’s-eye-view, but compromise their position; they are able survey every intimate detail of the scape, but are unable to grasp the narrative that created it (I suppose I cast the viewer as an omniscient god in a universe without history, where everything is known to them, and yet they are unable to state an origin, or are baffled by what will happen next. Like an all-powerful Cassandra. Tragic, really).


R B Grange.