Megalopolis

About

In previous work Ospina has taken portraits from the web profiles of a tech-savy youth, literate in the manipulations and visual vocabulary of contemporary image-making. Having reframed these portraits via painting as an interaction between identity, technology and media, Ospina now pans back to present the world these avatars inhabit. The Megalopolis is an environment in which recognisable landmarks are smothered by the overdeveloped filters of Photoshop extremists, riot scenes fold in to bedroom interiors, architectural spaces collapse into landscapes from news reports and rearranged elements from other artists' work; it is an environment forged by the vagaries of the users of social media and the products that define them.

Ospina?s work uses architectures of painting as a way of negotiating contemporary problems of image-making and artistic production in a networked world of complex relationships, inconsistent representations, and of technologies that have produced a flow of information at a magnitude and rate that is literally super-human. He says: ?I try to work in ways that reflect continuous changes in attention at a rate and method that would have seemed absurd before the arrival of the Internet, simulating what happens in our minds when we jump from image to image accumulating and merging layers of visual information. I want the work to reflect how the Internet has mutated the way we look at sets of images or contemplate a stream of information.?

Megalopolis is ultimately a record of how the Internet has transformed our relationship to images, to space and to each other in bizarre and unprecedented ways.

Alejandro Ospina (Born 1970 in Bogotá, Colombia) studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, the New York Studio School and Duke University, USA. He has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad including Paradise Row, London; Witzenhausen Gallery, New York; Galerà­a Jenny Vilà , Cali; Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá, and at the Centro Cultural Salamanca. Ospina has completed a residency at Altos de Chavón, Dominican Republic, participated in an exchange program at the Parsons School of Design, Paris and is currently undertaking a studio residency at the Departure Foundation, London. Ospina recently performed with Eva Recacha at Bloomberg Space, London, in 2011 and exhibited his Algorithms series in a solo presentation curated by Carlos Blanco at the Centro Colombo-Americano in Bogotá.

Megalopolis is supported by the Embassy of Colombia.