16th October 07
MAT COLLISHAW
Photographer, sculptor and filmmaker. Mat Collishaw was born in Nottingham and studied at Goldsmith's College in London .
Much of his work contains historical and art-historical references to the interaction between nature and culture . throughout his career Collishaw has appropriated all manner of disturbing images - pornographic images, images of suicide victims...
He states : " I'm interested in the way imagery hits subliminally. ...Whether I like it or not, there are mechanisms within us that are primed to respond to all kinds of visual material, leaving us with no real say over what we happen to be stimulating . The type of adverts to be found on television and in glossy magazines are visually designed to have power over the mind before they can even be questioned .
The dark side of my work, primarily concerns the internal mechanisms of visual imagery and how these mechanisms address the mind ".
The artist lives and works in London . He took part in the exhibitions Freeze (1989) and was showing some work in Frieze 2007 .
I really like his work as it offers a troubled and contradictory kind of beauty, one in which sentimentality, desire, pain, cynicism and faith all ceaselessly collide . This combination of sentiments, tenderness and brutality in equal measures and in the way which are visually seductive makes me wonder about our own nature.
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