Context of the Series (Download Text)

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The subtle(er) and non-traditional use of the glitch aesthetic is used to talk about human language, conditioning, memory/imagination and our ability to personify anything. The glitch aesthetic is used to in a literal sense to depict images that are imagined or remembered— unclear, fuzzy, something from the past, a dream or perhaps a nightmare. Using photographs of various bottles, the scenes are created to convey drama and story.

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His Master’s Voice is a series of digital works in larger series called Personal Hieroglyphs. The subject of this piece is the physical and conceptual separation of the ideas of language, meaning, and the relationships between human perception and tangible reality. This works consists of a collage of photographic and digitally composed elements. 

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In the work His Master’s Voice, at the center of the image is the “eye” block— separated from the rest of the face and rendered in black and white. Originally sculpted in clay, it is given just enough detail to appear as realistic but is visibly unfinished and has several distortions invoking the idea that it is not perfect, flawed, perhaps in the middle of its evolution and yet-to-be formed. The eye-block is set in a black field that is of the same dimensions as the physical works in the series, with the excepting that this field is “framed”. Frames have been used for centuries. A frame is a guide. It attracts attention and focus. Created from a photograph of a clay model and digitally mashed up, the psychological significance of the frame is evoked, 

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The third element of this loop references is another work called “And all is night.” With one hand missing and the other outstretched as if pointing or commanding the eye where to look, this element is the visual personification of instinct and conditioning. The three major elements are set in a flickering field of light and shadows — shadows resemble those made by trees, and flicking that of lightning in a stormy night.

 

The works Tribute and the Funeral are used to talk about religion and death respectively.
 

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Process

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I’ve always loved the glitch aesthetic ever since my days in school in the 90’s. Glitch, noise, static and distressed images were a big part of my childhood growing up when watching my fav TV shows meant getting your TV antenna on the roof at the right angle OR watching Hollywood movies meant hoping to death that the VHS tapes played cleanly on the Beta Max. Then MTV came and really reinforced the idea that untidy was cool. While I hope to get into coding my glitches soon, coming from a design/fine art background my process starts physically with the various elements of the work and moves digitally from there as if putting a collage together on PS. 

 

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Statement of Purpose/ About the Artist

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“I’ve always been fascinated by how we use language, memory and emotion to take in the world around us and assign meaning to things. Experience by experience, memory by memory, idea by idea we create worlds internally which are uniquely our own. But we also live in an external, shared reality that is real, undeniable —indisputable. So, how can two people look at the same object or event and have such vastly different interpretations and reactions to it?”

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“All-in-all, my purpose is to create art work and art experiences that are unique, memorable, have purpose and maybe even cause the reader/ viewer to stop, think — and perhaps even feel.”

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Born in 1980, Malcolm completed his BA from Mumbai University, Diploma from JD Institute of Fashion Design, and MBA from Sikkim Manipal University.

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With a varied professional background in music, clothing design, branding design, writing and most recently in corporate Learning and Development, he has always had an incredibly strong creative bent. 

Having spent 15 years working in corporate Learning and Development, Malcolm decided to put this experience into practice and pursue his life-long passion in art full-time in 2019. "After years of heading global corporate L&D, designing learning programs and systems and training people, I saw no reason why I couldn't point myself in a specific direction and put together a robust, continuing program for myself in the arts," he adds. 

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Malcolm is self-trained in the fine arts (drawing/painting) and currently lives and works in Bengaluru, Karnataka.

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Website: https://www.malcolmfernandes.art/
Email: malcolmfernandes.art@gmail.com
 

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