Millennial Fever

About

Sam is a practicing artist and painter currently residing in Brighton and Hove and working out of Red Herring Studios. He has continued to work on a series of new figurative paintings over 2017 which will be shown in the Take Courage space. 

Like Generation X, The G.I Generation or the Lost Generation, The Millennials are people of the same age group, who have similar ideas, problems, and attitudes. This group of people are the most familiar with communications, media and digital technology and it is saturated into their everyday living for good and often bad. Most of this group are users of giant Web 2.0 platforms and social media that have thrown the internet into a fascinatingly mysterious and increasingly hazardous place. 
The internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age. As people are increasingly at ease in the Web’s multidimensionality, marketers, government, and civil society are migrating massively to the networks people construct by themselves and for themselves. At root, social-networking entrepreneurs are really selling spaces in which people can freely and autonomously construct their lives.

The influence of the internet on our society is central to Sam’s practise and is the source for most of his reference material. Photoshop collages from internet sourced images are initially made to plan out the bigger canvases, utilising a grid format to work to the desired scale. This also allows for parts to be added or taken away at will. The content of these collages is made up of a variety of images; from screenshots, fashion and tech advertisements, to documentary photography of e-waste, landfill and conflict. Realising these final works in paint on canvas, this slowed, manual approach to image making gives a new meaning to the image or collage as an appropriation or documentation, but also a unique object as a painting in itself. The subject of the work is as heavily involved with painting itself as it is with modern living.