STATEMENT

The technique of photomontage began as an institutional critique of "high art." Responding the ubiquity of advertisement images, Dada artists appropriated commercial images into an art context, deconstructing the images themselves and the ideologies surrounding them. In this project, the appropriation is not so clear. I took both commercial and non-commercial images and turned them into a hybrid art-advertisement. Since the beginning of the 20th Century, art institutions have responded to the collage aesthetic by expanding and including it among the ranks of painting and sculpture. The initial spirit of photomontage as an institutional critique now appears in the form of critique of abuses in power, be it intellectual or physical. This montage responds to ideologies surrounding the fragmentation of the body in a quickly advancing post-human age.