Christopher Weeks

Untitled
digital image
30 x 40 in.

My work has evolved from a long desire to tell stories. These stories become reflections of my perceptions, transforming the world around me into a series of bright visual hieroglyphs. Acting as both social commentary and contemporary fable, the result is, more often than not, a series of sardonic observations of the world I see, dealing predominately with social rites of passage and the conflicts and challenges of surviving in today’s world. Filtered through the twin lenses of imagination and memory, these issues become symbolic of the struggles which we all face in some from or another, therefore serving as both a catharsis and an exploration of events which forge us all both as individuals as well as society.

Visually, I like to create work which is stylish, compelling and dynamic, playing off the same slick visual vernacular which inundates us on an everyday level. However, I do not want to create work which acts as nothing more than eye candy, but rather, work which, instead, serves on a deeper, more visceral level. As a visual society, our very thoughts, needs, desires, beliefs and opinions are often forged by the visual stimulus fed to us through a variety of media, from politics to fashion, from propaganda to Madison Avenue advertising. My work seeks to follow in the vein of these predecessors. Stylistically influenced by comic books, slick glossy color advertisements, movie posters and other forms of pop culture mass media, my images are presented in a manner which is as much a part of the same hegemonic American pop culture as it is a comment upon it. In this way, my work, my wok falls into the same vein as such works as Art Spiegelaman’s “Maus” and Jim Shaw’s “My Mirage Series”, in the sense that it explores the boundaries of what comics and pop media can be and the issues they can address as opposed to mainly mimicking its formal qualities (such as the benday dots) and visual language as Roy Lichtenstein did in his Pop Art paintings. By utilizing a visual syntax with which most people can relate, my goal is to ward off some of the stigma which currently alienates many from Fine Art.

© Christopher Weeks