Diary Rooms #3

Diary Room #3  [2018]

‘Diary Room’ mixes virtual space, real space and constructed realities into a collection of portraits and video sequences, inspired by Big Brother and the Velazquez and Bacon Popes. Bacon’s numerous studies of Valazquez’s ‘Portrait of Pope Innocent X’ (1650) appropriate the format, and re-imagine, re-contextualise and twist the ideas of the original portrait - for me these paintings are all part of the same discussion as the original.  Sometimes calm and realistic, or agitated, or hysterical and hyperreal - the diary rooms, and reality TV talking heads, hand us a series of varied, contemporary, human portraits. I want to push and blur the lines of materiality between the object and the jpeg, online and offline worlds, the natural and the synthetic, the historical and the contemporary.

Jo McGarry is an artist based in London, currently studying an MFA at the Slade School of Art, UCL.

www.jomcgarry.com