CHRISTOPHER COPPERS :

What place does media and technology have in our lives? To what extent have we become image addicts? I question our relationship with and behavior toward the omnipresence of images and offer a variation on the media’s overconsumption.

I grew up with a curious eye for the world around me and with a taste for constantly surpassing my own work and the work of my parents, both photographers. I also developed a passion for books and magazines that I collected from the age of ten. Throughout my artistic education I explored the theme of graphic contamination: take a picture and tear it to see what you can get out of it, or try a paradoxical approach of controlled “creative destruction”. I spent hours playing on an image with a cutter to give another value to a magazine or book a second life, through an exploration of textures, materials and reliefs. .. I have even resorted to a resin technique, which permeates the paper. I am particularly interested in the status media has been given in people’s lives. For some, magazines have become almost a religion, a mandatory manual for their everyday lives. Indeed, they explain how to eat, how to deal with our sexual, sentimental, and social lives…”

By considering paper prints from different angles, to 3D, to using my waste, my means of expression evolved and revealed my views on contemporary society. It is no wonder that one of my recurring themes is sexuality, a pillar of our social behaviour: “Despite the emancipation of ’68, sexuality is today both pervasive and taboo. It has been taken hostage by the media, but on a personal level it has almost become has-been to broach the subject

By conceptualizing our society’s media deviances, my passionate relationship to glossy paper and to image asserted itself and grew in an ever more inventive fashion. Indeed, we find here my 3D cut covers, but this time with an imbedded iPod, broadcasting a series of images that enhance or provide additional meaning to the paper image. By playing with our collective unconscious minds, I question our relationship to the dictatorship of images. While watching TV in the U.S., I constantly had to deal with programs being incessantly cut by ads; we are literally held hostage! Reality TV dependency is also a fascinating subject. Is it voyeurism, the desire to enter other people’s lives? How long will we try to cure our tiredness and boredom with such emptiness? The purpose is bitter, but I refuse to pass as an activist: “Media manipulation is omnipresent. I do not, however, reject it.

Portfolio: