Marc Bridger
Visual Artist

Artist Statement

The metaverse encapsulates the confluence of our virtual, digital, and physical existences. As realities collide to become the metaverse, new meaning forms infiltrate our spaces armed with a lexicon of innuendo and fragments. Fragments recursively reconstructing our existence as a domain governed by bits. My work probes this verse through scatter and fracture, while wielding propaganda's anterior language of oil painting. Surface reticulations in paint handling intertwine formal and conceptual concerns, forming allegorical constructs of alterity that mine messages from our fragmented digital sphere. The stylistic hatches and bands are enmeshed with personal figurative images, centering the discourse on our metaverse and its emergent gaze. A conversation examining the precarity of global social conditions that subjugate humanity through a commodity driven existence. My latest thesis work employs a conceptual fusion via the metaverse artform—an auto-exhibiting synthesis that transcends the digital and physical art object. This complex emergent amalgam mirrors our mobius-strip metaverse, enfranchising an experience mediated by the device.

Trajectory

Space Invaders is the current expression of these concerns in a body of work where imaginative plots and the McDonald's crew reemerge as celebrity signifiers; while ideology, technology, and cultural tensions become hostile invaders. The ongoing vilification of immigrants are frictions that envelop my multiracial and multicultural family. In response, ideological assaults are anthropomorphized into storied collages that mine messages from our fragmented digital world, transforming them into varied trajectories and angles of perspective. Quantum physics yields metaphoric support; while identity, absurdity, and nostalgia are ferment for manufactured conflict. The formal and conceptual method of constructing the artificial painted object directly links to the artificial humanistic constructions of nationalism, racism, and ethnocentrism. Constructions altered in recent history that now jeopardize the egalitarian existences for families of diversity. These concerns manifest via spatial insertions, painting forms, and binary hatches. Hatches that suffuse into microcosms of hue and value revealing vibrant glints of versicolor—the same luculent tones within all people that exist in, on, and underneath the tissue thin layer associated with race. Thus, Space Invaders amalgamates figurative subjects, spectacle, and metaverse milieu with consumerism, political vicinities, and corporate antagonism; yielding an invasion of these cultural conditions into our most private spaces.