Alone Together
In this corporate-site-specific commission for Tyro Payments, multiple human figures from the contemporary urbanscape are captured, trapped and displayed as if they were specimens. Presented as cut-out silhouettes, these suggestively blank forms are at once familiar and distant. Always portrayed from the rear, thus lending an uneasy sense of observation the figures are unaware of their capture, absorbed by their communication devices. Their presentation, as generic tropes entombed within radiantly coloured monochromatic sheets is a curious visual inversion of the sample within the glass. It is a perspective that enables the work to combine commentary with documentation of recent profound social changes in human interaction. Suspended upon office walls and integrated within the working environment of this rising tech-savvy corporation, artist Jo Meisner‘s serial photographic installation continues her engagement with the notion of the self within the crowd. The static, colourless figure at the centre of each work stands as metaphor for an idea that Jo has been exploring for some time now – the simultaneous alienation and connection of the individual within community - and particularly, its manifestation in our highly digitized and device dependant contemporaneity. Big, colourful, and thought-provoking, Alone Together sits in the tradition of the French “Figuration Narrative” movement of the 1960s in which portrait painting was expanded by the aesthetics and social commentary of Pop art. There is a fresh immediacy conveyed by the digital processes behind the works. What was seen only last week is now enlarged and printed with the ubiquitous media of our age. There it is, multiplied, a rectangular reflective screen within which we see ourselves. Can we be alone while together? The sense of separation is familiar but perhaps it need not be uncomfortable. All around us – on a train, a bus stop, commuting to work, walking, we move as Jo observes, with “heads looking downward, not outward.” Yet while we may appear alienated, isolated and alone are we in fact more connected, enabled and together than ever before?
Lisa Sharp May 2016