My Artist Statement

Jack Baty (°1964, Grand Rapids, United States) makes photos and drawings. By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of middle class values, Baty makes works that can be seen as self-portraits. Sometimes they appear idiosyncratic and quirky, at other times, they seem typical by-products of American superabundance and marketing.

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        His photos are characterised by the use of everyday objects in an atmosphere of middleclass mentality in which recognition plays an important role. By parodying mass media by exaggerating certain formal aspects inherent to our contemporary society, he often creates work using creative game tactics, but these are never permissive. Play is a serious matter: during the game, different rules apply than in everyday life and even everyday objects undergo transubstantiation.
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        His collected, altered and own works are being confronted as aesthetically resilient, thematically interrelated material for memory and projection. The possible seems true and the truth exists, but it has many faces, as Hanna Arendt cites from Franz Kafka. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, he absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. This personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is important as an act of meditation.
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        His works are saturated with obviousness, mental inertia, clichés and bad jokes. They question the coerciveness that is derived from the more profound meaning and the superficial aesthetic appearance of an image.
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        (Not really. The above was automatically generated via <a href="http://www.500letters.org/form_15.php">500 Letters</a>) 
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