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.
One pre-occupation with 20th century modernism was the deformation of the
human body and face. Depicted in a variety of different paintings and sculpture the face was
consistently altered, cut up, and distorted. This reconfiguration and mutation of the face is
now echoed in contemporary culture and notions of body dysmorphia (or digitised
dysmorphic disorder).
Amplified by selfie culture and social media and a growing perception
that one’s body is thought to look wrong and doesn’t adhere to ‘normal’ images of the
‘standard’ body. Untitled Syndrome brings together the modernist white cube gallery with
the mediated, monstrous visualisations of digitised dysmorphia and the disfigured
contemporary face.
