Cathy Helps - Following the Sun
Cathy Helps
following the sun...
26 October - 13 November
Speed dialing, speed dating, speed consumption. Information follows the sun through time zones, as mass media delivers images at the speed that the globe turns following the light of dawn. Where the car once delivered the need for speed, now digital technology has redefined the classic road-trip through the cyber highway.
Cathy Helps, compares these two highways by working in a traditional media as painting and also contrasts this with digital information. She questions the validity of painting along side new media, Can painting change and move within this new terrain?
…following the sun…
New Zealand is one of the first places to see the new day. With it comes hope. Hope is linked to speed.
Speed dialing
Speed dating
Speed communication
Speed consumption
In contemporary contexts there is a desire and need for speed.
Information follows the sun through time zones.
Mass media delivers images and texts at the speed that the globe turns following the light of dawn.
The car and highway have always been linked to power, progress and visual consumption with the car windscreen acting as the surface of mediation between the solitary consumer and the landscape that is passed through. Expectations and hopes of freedom, glamour, sexual desire, status and pleasure bring with it dangers, fears and anxieties.
Where once the car and the highway delivered the need for speed through the classic road trip, now digital technology has redefined this metaphor of life through the cyber highway. Computers and digital technologies are overtaking the car and the highway, as the need for speed becomes greater. Old territories diminish as viewed in the rear vision mirror… time accelerates. New territories are everywhere and nowhere.
Through a collision of painterly and digital texts, Helps interrogates these new geographies and questions whether the cyber road trip can deliver on its promises of freedom or whether such ideals diminish as traces in the mirror as the need for speed accelerates? She also questions how a slow process like painting can compete in a contemporary context where information is delivered at the speed of light? Working within a traditional medium, she appropriates digital and photographic imagery from fashion and lifestyle magazines, TV and video into a painterly context. Her flattened views of the passing landscape take on new dimensions.
A new day brings hope as light is processed through the screen.