Ian Haig works across media, from video, sculpture, drawing, technology based media and installation. Haig’s practice refuses to accept that the low and the base level are devoid of value and cultural meaning. His body obsessed themes can be seen throughout a large body of work over the last twenty years. Previous works have looked to the contemporary media sphere and its relationship to the visceral body, the degenerative aspects of pervasive new technologies, to cultural forms of fanaticism and cults, to ideas of attraction and repulsion, body horror and the defamiliarisation of the human body.
The mutating conditions of the body overwhelm our screens; from television, cinema, the mobile phone and computer screen. The materiality of the body is ever present on screen – the history of Hollywood, is the history of the body – so intimate is a our relationship with the screen it can be considered an extension and outgrowth of our own biology. The screen becomes a projection of our desires, obsessions and perversions. The Screen of Flesh consists of a range of screen bodies and bodily screens.
The work presents the idea that the screen along with the technology of video are implicitly connected to the body, taking the spectator into previously unseen somatic and visceral dimensions of screen bodiliness.
Funded with the assistance of The Australia Council, 2014
