Jesse Avina
Artist Discipline: Media
Artistic Statement
My work is an exploration of my inability to register the difference between the reality and fantasy of war as mediated through popular culture. As an avid consumer of Hollywood's culture of violence, I find myself becoming lost in a myriad of converging perceptions of the impact and significance of global conflicts, both past and present. In being addicted to Jean Baudrillard's hyper-reality, the inability to discern fact from fiction, but simultaneously recognizing the simulacrum of all that I digest, I seek to discover whether fantasy can be the best mode for examining our convoluted relationship to representations of war.
By Crafting depictions of war via models, I become invested with authority over familiar scenes of destruction and carnage. As the creator I am elevated beyond the status of mere consumer. By displaying these miniatures landscapes as either photographs or videos. I adopt the role of producer, controlling output of the imagery and constructing the visuals of war in a mode similar to the media. However, unlike media conglomerates, these recontextualized scenes of conflict and violence are aware of their artificiality and register their existence in fantasy.