Printmaking Contemporary Practice

Sean McGuill

The Cloud Rains

This body of work is made in response to the mass media, particularly its manifestation on the internet, and its influence on contemporary society. I am fascinated by how we interact with and interpret the images, ideologies and slogans that are prevalent in daily life through the advertising, news, entertainment, and social media industries.

My work often uses found imagery taken from Facebook and other social media, which are then subverted by removing them from their original context and placing them into layered, collage style compositions. I am interested in the narrative that is created from the often random and incongruous combinations of images which are fed to us and consumed and an almost constant rate via social media on our mobile devices, in which photos of major global events and tragedies often appear next to memes, cute animals and social events, creating a visual and mental overload of information.

Despite the random appearance of the images that surround us, they are still very much mediated by complex algorithms and popular viral trends, creating an artificial construction of reality that reflects the ‘real world’, however inaccurate it may be. While navigating this landscape of so-called “post-truth” and “fake news”, I am drawn to the aesthetic and moral juxtapositions of these unrelated images and the visual world they inhabit.

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