Æneas MacRae

Studio Vancouver BC   CANADA

E-mail: aeneasmacrae@gmail.com

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My work is based on the concepts of construction and deconstruction using video, photography and digital imaging. Through the digital medium my work expands upon the many different new levels of information available to us. 

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My art is the expression of the emotional moment. What I create is the expressive, it seems to communicate the feeling that is important to me.I want to create a new expression of art using the digital medium.

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The internet and social media have changed the world and we are now several decades of life and the digital platforms intertwined as one.

Social media and the internet has made available to the masses just about every known creation to humankind. Whether it is a photograph taken just seconds ago or the stunning cave paintings from  Maltravieso, Spain 64,000 years ago. And everything in between.

This flood of imagery has created a wealth of the “found object.” The found object is a favourite staple used by artists for appropriation or collage etc.. The old and very old incorporated into the new.Picasso used the ancient African masks. Duchamp with his whimsical portrait of the Mona Lisa. Jeff Wall and his re interpretation of early Modernism or Renaissance Art with his large back lit photos etc.etc..

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David Hockney used photography for the basis of some of his paintings. Photography has always been a method and catalogue for celebration, and as a reminder of a time passed. Photography has been a wonderful way to catalogue our memories.And for us to revisit these moments of time passed.

Hockney paintings have been called a celebration of life. He lives in the moment and his art is a celebration of that moment in time. But time passes and thus the moment is gone. Very often we then reflect and experience a sense of loss of such a moment and a sense of longing.

Knowing that moment is gone with the photograph is just a harsh reminder of such a loss and of time passed.

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Francis Bacon also used photography for the basis of his paintings. He never used a sitter and always preferred to work from a photo. Bacon described his paintings as “concentrations of reality”.To me his art was not only a concentration of reality but an existential scream. This was a constant motif throughout his entire oeuvre. As it was also the prevalent theme of so many artisans of his time. Giacometti, Camus, and of course Heidegger and so many many more.

The Postmodern does not seem to be as interested in the Existential but it is still being expressed by the self or the “Being in theWorld” as Heidegger explained. The existential scream is still being felt and shared and shared extensively on social media. Post after post after post after banal post. Ad nauseam. It never ends. The banality of it all reduces the scream into just a whisper of nothingness. Perhaps that is what it should be. Just nothingness trying to find a meaning from nothing.

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The reflective study of the essence of consciousness as experienced from the first person point of view is known as Phenomenology.

An important element in Phenomenology analysis is intentionality or often described as "aboutness", the notion that consciousness is always consciousness of something.

When we see something, we always see it as something and project a certain set of expectation upon it; expectation which we then fulfilled or explored in subsequent perception.Objective thought is unaware of the subject of perception and instead presents the world as already made.
 
My work is based in the intuitive sense of what it means to exist and the very meaning of the Being in the Phenomenological sense. Being in the world we are fundamentally familiar with the world and our surroundings and this familiarity is a constant feature and experience to us, although Being is not constantly aware of it.

Placing together radically different images and presenting them as one work opens space to interpretation between the different images as well a reflection on the very nature of time. There are numerous paradoxes associated with attempts to understand time. For example how can the past and future be when the past is no longer and the future is not yet, and without these, how can there be a time such as the present, since the "present" requires the existence of a past and a future?

Philosopher Martin Heidegger claimed World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever non-objective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse, keep us transported into Being.  He describes this World as being the ever-changing.