Ken Wentworth

We are holding onto our future as it hangs perilously, our cultures pending demise being dependant on our collective actions. Holding onto outdated thought patterns, cultural infrastructures and histories at our peril. Dangling in a delicate predicament, where the future we hold in our hands can fall from grace. Hovering, and potentially slipping from our collective hands, as we blindly move forward, ambivalent  to the impending oblivion we co-create. Text inspired by ar...

'We are surrounded by emptiness, but it is an emptiness filled with signs.'

Lefebvre, Henri. Everyday life in the modern world

'Photography signaled the beginning of a time when the "image would become more important than the object itself, and would in fact make the object disposable." [Oliver Wendell] Holmes foresaw a time when surfaces would be routinely appropriated from any conceivable source, and would then take on an autonomous, yet objective, life of their own. "Form," he proclaimed, "is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on ...

Collages and ready mades are testimonials to the fact that all forms of representation whether they be pictures or words or gestures - are dependent on cultural languages. What we know and represnent is not something natural, but cultural, and does not exist in an ideal essence but is shaped by history.

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'We can describe the bubble two ways, the first being what it stands for. The bubble is a world of entertainment, pleasure, and fun where happiness is derived from material things and sensual experience, where there are no limits on personal freedom, and where there are no consequences for our actions. Alternatively, we can define the bubble by what it opposes: the bubble exists to deny reality to us, to keep us from our truth, be it moral, cultural, spiritual or aesthetic. Truth is like a pi...

'But suppose we thought about representation, not in terms of a particular kind of object (like a statue or a painting) but as a kind of activity, process, or set of relationships. Suppose we de-reified the thing that seems to stand before us, standing for something else, and thought of repre...

'Pictures are things that have been marked with all the stigma of personhood and animation: they exhibit both physical and virtual bodies; they speak to us, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively; or they look back at us silently across a gulf unbridged by language. They present not just a surface but a face that faces the beholder. In short, we are stuck with our magical, pre-mode...

'It was an attempt to diagnose the 'pictorial turn' in contemporary culture, the widely shared notion that visual images have replaced words as the dominant mode of expression in our time. Picture theory tried to analyse the pictorial, or (as it is sometimes called) the 'iconic' or 'visual' turn, rather than simply accept it on face value. It was designed to resist received ideas about ...

I view my work as working with artefacts, the magazine image is the original artefact, and by painting over it I enact a form of reverse restoration. Through the painting over, highlighting and accentuating elements of the original, I reveal symbolism within the image... but instead of revealing new colour and form through a process of removing dirt and accumulated blockages to meaning, as with traditional restoration....