Philip Kitt

Painting
01.12–02.05.1995

The content of my work revolves around a series of dichotomies: private and public, rendering and mass production, pleasure and pain, nature and culture, fullness and emptiness, organization and chaos, and finally, dichotomies of scale. I work to create a visual arena where representations of the many physical, temporal, and social spaces of contemporary existence, constituted as a lexicon, can interact with one another and sketch out new spatial possibilities. I use the iconography of science to examine how the world is represented and transformed through image technologies, and how science is, in turn, influenced by the cultural matrix in which it is situated. I employ images of the military apparatus to illustrate the dangers inherent in developing science and technology without regard for their moral implications. The military apparatus is the unique site where the ideal of the collaboration of all the arts, technologies, and sciences in service of a single objective is achieved. Ironically, this results in the creation of ever more efficient killing machines.