New Artwork – Ian Rogers – Collage

Today, a collage. I’ve been reading a lot of J.G. Ballard lately, what can I say?

My source materials for this digital collage were images of the 15-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, the arm of a Hitachi hydraulic excavator, a vintage Plymouth Fury, and a photo of the first underwater nuclear explosion (Operation Crossroads, 1946)

What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylised glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings.

– J.G. Ballard, the Atrocity Exhibition