Alnis Stakle - Mellow Apocalypse

Mellow Apocalypse

The world of images becomes ever more saturated, and our capacity to grasp and comprehend it is becoming increasingly limited. Poetically speaking, the map has grown larger than the territory. Nowadays, we can access almost the entire visual culture that humanity has amassed. In this day and age, when each and every one of us has become a producer and storyteller who strives to express and draw attention to oneself, publicly wallow in melancholy in the social media, to earn money, practise civil journalism etc., the accessibility of the world of images is no longer a privilege, but a self-evident tradition.

I am interested in the fate of the canonized artistic, scientific and journalistic images and their potential to embody contemporary meanings. The collages are grounded in my search for syntactic visual language connections in the pictures about various periods, media and domains of the visual culture. I have used images from open source collections of museums, scientific institutions and image banks whose archives may be considered iconic testimonies of the present and the past. The collages use the ideas and technical codes established in the visual communication that transcend the borderlines of ages, media and cultures. The codes are so deeply ingrained 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 globalized 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.

The technical execution of the collages is based on image post-processing software algorithms, which allow them to 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.

All works are archival pigment ink prints on rag paper, in sizes from 120cm x 90cm to 150cm x 150cm.