Stephen Haley | World Standard
Stephen Haley examines the shake ups of our time – global urbanisation and the rise of the digital era.
A Melbourne-based painter, digital media artist, Haley investigates actual and virtual space in an increasingly digitalised and urban world. Outlining the rapid growth of urbanisation, Haley states from his research, “In 1900 only 10% of the entire world’s population lived in cities, by 1990 that had reached 50% with an estimated 75% by 2025.1 The environmental effects of this unprecedented situation alone have geologists proposing that the Holocene Era is over and the Anthropocene – where human activity is the single greatest determiner of planet’s physical condition – has begun.”
Furthermore his practice explores the psychological and social behavioural effects of the digital era, in which the digital has become embedded in our everyday, analogue world. “Google is practically a second memory and we are all, to varying extents, office workers”, he outlines. A sordid thought to bear.
In ‘World Standard’ Haley investigates the spaces of this digital, international world – recast as global, generic, rational or abstract. Increasingly, buildings and objects are created using 3D and other software programs to envisage and plan before they are built.
Haley’s works are paintings of such simulations, the viewer is presented with silent premade spaces – drawing parallels to the stark, silent setting of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The effect is unnervingly accurate.
EXHIBITION
Stephen Haley | New World Standard
30 June – 30 July
MARS Gallery
Courtesy the artist and MARS Gallery.
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