Matthew Belanger
new media artistMetaglyphs
Click a thumbnail to enlarge photos.
In 1997 I began a series of drawings and paintings, using dirt and water applied with sticks and a garden hose on heavy paper, which I would later bury in my backyard. Weeks, months, and sometimes years later I unearthed whatever remained. These remains would later become the foundation for this series of work.
In 1999 I picked up a Pokemon coloring book and started flipping though it. I turned to a page where, as ridiculous as it may sound, the simplicity of the line drawing made me immediately recall the cave walls of Lascaux. I decided then to produce a series of modern cave paintings by combining my dirt drawings, which already had the appearance of a rough cave wall, with contemporary icons. The iPod, American Express card, and Ms. Pac-Man, the corporate logos of Microsoft, Enron, and Napster, as well as modern words and phrases like Y2K, .com, and SARS where all appropriated. Using Adobe PhotoShop, I treated everything to look several thousand years old.
The Dancing Baby, an internet and television icon of the late 90s, is both an icon of the technology age and a reminder of the Roman putti. The Tomagotchi virtual pet recalls pre-Columbian art of South America. The rounded form of the original iMac resembles a Greek vessel. Clarus the Dogcow is like a bison drawn on a cave wall, and the cursor, a hunting spear.
This body of work aims to simultaneously connect the viewer with an era long past and a time recently experienced. It asks us to consider what will future humans think of us 10,000 years from now?
Metaglyphs was first exhibited in 2000 at The Art Institute of Boston. They have also been exhibited at Art Push 2001 in St. Petersburg, Russia, at the Novosibirsk State Art Museum and Levall Gallery in Novosibirsk, Russia, and took 2nd Prize at the 2000 HyperArt Biennale.
This work by Matthew Belanger is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.