Mandy Kavanagh

Duration

This series of digital video collages are a merging of appropriated film footage sourced from the internet. This source material is made up of a merging of advertising, popular music videos, historical cinematic footage and text.

I appropriate existing footage and combine sound and moving image to create new works. I use contemporary digital technologies to locate myself within the works where my face takes the place of the protagonist , the actor or musician in the existing image. I edit, manipulate and layer this footage in various ways merging images and sounds. The music video is a persistent trope and often acts as both soundtrack and subject.

The works attempt to unfold the Mise-en-scène, exploring broadly held concerns in culture as a whole, about the role of the mass media in our lives, and about the ways in which we shape our personal identities. These playful explorations of identity and desire, influenced by various strands of critical theory, political militancy, and pop-cultural investigations, reflect the widespread reinterpretation of the relationships that have taken place between sexuality, race, power and identity.

The works stem from a background in the still photograph, and a fundamental interest in the constructed image and its meaning in these constructed moving images. The video collages use memory and association as a mechanism to question the nature of cinematic perception and the constructing of an embodied cinematic experience.