Sam Creasey

The paintings presented in my Show2020 appropriate photographs, digital scans, and video stills taken from interactions with the city through the lens of my working life. As a painter, I see the act of making as a purgative and introspective kind of labour. This forms the culmination of an extended preliminary process, which is largely digital, and media based. In today’s modern cities, numerous smart city technologies are woven into the fabric of the environment. With this in mind I
explore the constantly reforming connection between the body, and the unforgiving municipal materials of steel, concrete, glass and fibre optic cable. 

Inspired by groups like the Situationist International and Guy Debord as well as more recent psychogeographers like Ian Sinclair, I encourage the same kind of drifting or ‘dérive’ prevalent in psychogeography when I experience the city. The only difficulty is that my journeys are often dictated and mapped by an algorithm on a driver’s handset. My routes are predetermined, and the goal is efficiency, not discovery. As a very financially centric city, London’s capitalistic bubble is seen both on my journeys and subsequently in my paintings through sprawls of large modern advertising screens that straddle the infrastructure. Making art in response is somewhat an attempt to negate the repetitive and impersonal slog of technology
and capital and direct these numbing dynamics into a creative and constructive narrative.  

Fractured and warped images of buildings, spaces, figures and objects combine in the work to portray the urban environment as an abstracted underbelly where stimuli overflow the senses. I am fond of the notion of ‘underbelly’ because It reveals what isn’t always seen on the surface of the city or the mask it wears. I find a good method to visualise this is with flatbed scanning – a method I use a lot in my work. Unlike with a way in which the camera sees, flatbed scanning requires close proximity and essential contact with the surface of the recorded object for clarity. It demands a consideration for the micro as well as the macro. Pressed against a ground nothing comes between the object that is being seen and the eye of the scanner which does the looking. Seeing from the ground up, the viewer is often placed underneath as if amongst the foundations of the cityscape, looking up at the detritus that leaks off the sprawling ebbs, flows and rhythms that form its totality.