Context of the Series (Download Text)

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These works are very much a response and commentary to the times we live in today. 

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Only a generation ago, it was normal to meet people who had lived their entire lives within the confines of their own space or village or town — people who only heard about and saw the rest of the entire world from inside tv screens, newspapers, magazines and radio broadcasts — many never seeing or meeting “foreigners” or experiencing “other” cultures in real life in their entire lives. 

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Though the technology exists, I’d guess that many people today, too, still haven’t gotten around to connecting to people from outside their own sphere of influence… yet.

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But technology is changing this… by pure force of change.

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I’m Indian, I’m Roman catholic, I’ve lived and been educated in the city all my life and I’ve traveled the world a bit… but put a person, object or even an idea before me that is “alien” to “my normal” and I will easily feel out-of-place, uncomfortable, or maybe even threatened or attacked — at least at first. 

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But this is normal. It is understandable. It is universal. Every person on the planet can only perceive what they experience. And everybody experiences only a little snippet of the whole picture— if you will.

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Then there’s a second phase to my reaction (if I can catch it) where I have to consciously reign in my initial impulses of fight or flight, use thought and maybe logic and education and — sometimes kindness and empathy, to steer away from the doomsday alarms ringing in my nervous system and almost guide myself to work with the “new” that is in front of me.

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But this second phase only kicks in sometimes and in a select number of situations especially when I have the skill, aptitude and awareness.

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So, what happens when it doesn’t?

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What happens if I stay in the first phase?

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What happens when groups of people feel (or are made to feel) the same way and are wittingly or unwittingly held up in “phase 1”?

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What happens when majority populations are made to envision the “alien”, are coerced away from the second phase and towards just reacting?

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Connected the way we are, our world today is in the throngs of the “new”. 

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This “new” consists of everything from new technology, cultures, food, beliefs, ideas, values, customs etc. etc. and like it or not, each person on the planet is caught up in this game of push and pull between the internal and the external — only now we’re facing consequences of mammoth proportions. 

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Today, this challenge comes to us in the movements between ideas of freedom and tyranny (and when freedom or tyranny in one place easily influences it in another and vice versa).

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The Cycle is about the interwoven world of the internal and the external. These works use the glitch aesthetic to talk to three specific aspects in this regard:
1.    Unconscious Instincts (of Self-Preservation and Self-Propagation), 
2.    the Conscious Will, and 
3.    the External-shared (real) world we live in

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Like a graphic novel, the ideas of Freedom (in the caricature of Gandhi and the work that he did to rally an entire country to fight for freedom using non-violent means), Reality, Change, Learning and Instinct are highlighted in 5 separate panels.

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The glitch “effect” is also the Message itself in the Cycle, and the Glitch is Your Way Out and The Burden of Freedom is Decision.

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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. For example: The Danger sign in act 2 (The Cycle, and the Glitch is Your Way Out). Began with a physical painting of a metal sign I found in a government factory. The painting was scanned and digitally tweaked in photoshop. The two faces of the work Where’s the Dip were sculpted in polymer clay and the cones were made from cement molds before being photographed and added into the collage. The footage of Gandhi and his followers in the background and the bust were added and tweaked in 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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