Simone Paterson

Artist Statement

Keywords:

I am a new permanent resident of America. The differences between the land of my birth (Australia) and the USA may be subtle but the effect of these differences can turn simple tasks into more difficult situations. Take for example driving, more than once I have found myself facing an on-coming vehicle while driving on the wrong side of the road. Inconvenient as these differences may be, living in America has caused me to reconsider ways of being in the world. I now question notions of normalcy or neutrality and attempt to decipher my own cultural perception.

My creative research is always grounded in the practice of new media art. Sculptures are embedded with monitors or computers and digital images combine with projected video loops. Sound is often used in a way to assist in the reading of the work. However it is content, rather than aesthetics, that is my main concern and motivation. I am a post-modernist baby where deconstruction and fragmentation are the ideals by which my artistic practices are founded. I construct images through immersion into popular culture, by Internet browsing, watching television, and going to the cinema. Through humor, irony and entertainment I turn mainstream, digital culture against itself, in the hope of encouraging more feminist voices to participate in the disembodied on-line world of Internet. My aim as a new media artist is to break up coherent systems of meaning and to construct new meanings that are open and different from what is imposed by the dominant paradigm.

Simone Paterson Bio

Simone Paterson is Assistant Professor of New Media Art and Theory, Department of Art and Art History, Virginia Tech. In 2005 she was awarded a PhD in Philosophy/ Fine Arts, from The University of Newcastle, Australia, where her research focused upon cyborg culture and third wave feminism. In 1995 she was awarded a Master of Visual Arts from the University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts and was the winner of the New South Wales Travelling Art Prize. Her installations consist of sculptural fabric forms and large-scale digital prints, interactive new media works, digital video and animation.