Artist Profile - Pia Dowse
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Biography
Pia was born in Ascot, 1987, moved to Monmouth 1991, attended Hereford Cathedral School where she exhibited twice in the Three Choirs Festival and graduated with one of the top marks in the country for A level fine art. She has just graduated with a first class Fine Art Degree at University College Falmouth.
Artist Statement
GRADUATE SHOW PIECES:We live in an age of bountiful corporate consumerism spread through mass media images. Giant advertising billboards, glossy magazines, television and an omnipotent presence of ‘celebrity’ shape our society. The ubiquity of commercialism and increasing urbanisation leads us away from anything authentic and instead leads us to a radical artificial environment where genuine interaction is supplanted by interaction with images on TV, computer games, billboards and magazine advertising. The wide circulation of these images in society and the possibilities of manipulating such imagery using computers leads to another refined layer of artificiality imposed on reality. My paintings therefore are ‘not so much a reference to a visible or tangible reality, but rather to a reality that is artificial, otherworldly or fabricated.’ (Debbaut). I try to create a cool artificiality through painting urban landscapes or eccentric visions of nature both of which occasionally combine in an equilibrium, both seemingly constructed from the same material. My paintings, like mass media images, should give a ’personal’ glimpse into a world away from your own but I hope the world reveals itself to be a hoax through the bizarre, awkward and unreal juxtapositions of objects. I directly reference renaissance religious painting as a way of translating biblical stories into a contemporary context. However the contrasts to urban consumer images are there to question whether urban, consumer society has warped religion and spirituality. Whereas traditional religion offered the hope of transcendence can our quest be far easier met now by glittery images that naturally transport us to another realm? Has the ’consumer experience’ taken the place of ’religious experience’? Perhaps consumerism is the new religion.