Ovi by Nokia presents: meet Jeremy, character designer and electronic musician

Hi readers, the Pictoplasma festival is getting closer, and following our introduction of Rilla, we’d like to present you Jeremy Dower, one of the artists exhibiting at the Ovi by Nokia guided Character Walk at Pictoplasma festival. Hello Jeremy! Could you tell us a bit about yourself? Hi all! I graduated from ...

Hi readers,

the Pictoplasma festival is getting closer, and following our introduction of Rilla, we’d like to present you Jeremy Dower, one of the artists exhibiting at the Ovi by Nokia guided Character Walk at Pictoplasma festival.

Hello Jeremy! Could you tell us a bit about yourself? Hi all! I graduated from the VCA Painting department in Melbourne, Australia in 1996. After that I stopped painting for a while, I spent nearly a decade making electronic music, and released several albums internationally, under the names Jeremy Dower, Tetrphnm, Tet et Hok, and  Dr.DX100 and the P.C. Folk Ensemble. The most notable albums being “Sentimental Dance music for Couple”, and “Music for Retirement Villages, Circa 2050″.  During this period I also worked as an artist in the computer game, film, animation, and fashion industries.

Living in Tokyo in the early 2000s, I became inspired by new alternative art movements; Urban Art, Pop Surrealism, Neo Pop, alternative Manga and Anime, and the ‘character design’ phenomenon, centred around the Pictoplasma Festival.

I have been involved in several international exhibitions including ‘Pictopia’, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Could you tell us about your exhibition at Pictoplasma? ‘Canis Mortuus Familiaris’ is a touring exhibition, the first leg opened in Melbourne, Australia, earlier this year. The next stop is Berlin, as part of the Pictoplasma festival Character walk. Then finally the exhibition will finish up in New York City at Bold Hype Gallery, on the 14th of April.

The title ‘Canis Mortuus Familiaris’ is a corruption of  ‘Canis Lupus Familiaris’, the Latin scientific name for the domestic dog. ‘Lupus’  (wolf) is substituted with ‘mortuus’, dead. Canis  Mortuus Familiaris is an exhibition comprised entirely of phantasmagorical pooches. Featuring a series of digital archival prints, drawings, laser cut aluminium sculptures, and also video.

The digital images were created using a digital painting and deformation process. From a series of mutations, individuals were selected on the basis of criteria such as novelty, grotesqueness, anthropomorphism, and infantile tendencies. Resulting in a sequence of spectral pooches, which exhibit the same kind of extreme anatomical distortions found in certain types of cartoon and video game characters. Their physical form shifts freely between the texture of fur to smoke and clouds, and they are melting and gaseous at the periphery, suggesting only a very tenuous hold on corporeality.

The exhibition also explores several other concepts of ongoing personal interest: animism, the relationship between the viewer and the subject, as an animistic experience, the uncanny, “the familiar that has somehow become strange and disturbing…”, facial recognition and perception, in particular the innate human ability to see faces in random stimuli, and digital painting as a valid and important alternative to traditional painting media, in the context of the contemporary dominance of digital screen-culture.

What are you mostly looking forward to from the festival? I am very excited about the festival this year, I really am looking forward to everything happening. I’ve been working so hard on my own exhibition over the last year. So I’m really interested to see what kind of work the others will be be showing. And the lecture program is always very inspiring too, i will enjoy that.

- Thanks Jeremy!

Jeremy’s exhibition Canis Mortuus Familiaris is held at Panatom gallery at Torstrasse 100. Check out also Jeremy’s music from his web site.

Source : http://blog.ovi.com/2011/03/28/ovi-by-nokia-presen...