JONNY SEVEN ART

Jonny Seven explores Remix culture and Censorship. He uses New Media to reimagine existing iconic works. His work draws influence work from the Dadaists who used montage and cut and paste, along with the "art of the ready made". He embraces techniques and philosophies of Pop Art and recent artists like Douglas Gordon who famously won the Turner Prize for his 24 hour version of the Hitchcock classic 'Psycho'.

'Nasty', layers 72 so called 'Video Nasties' from the mid to late 20th century into a single video work. No one scene is discernible from another but shown together nightmarish scenes of rape, murder, cannibalism and torture are amplified. The comparatively trivial scenes in between seem to be equally hellish because of the chaotic nature of the presentation.

'Untitled Circa 1951' attempts to Control Abstract Expressionism. Patterns and colours reappear in ways that echo the 'patterns/fractals' evident in Jackson Pollock's drip paintings. The precision that digital techniques afford add a new element revealing mathematical structures.

The work here is born of a dark time in history – our government reacted to the 'moral panic' of the so called 'Video Nasties' by introducing the Video Recordings Act 1984. 39 films were banned outright; tapes were seized and torched in scenes reminiscent of book burning acts across the 20th Century. Recent amendments to the 2003 Digital Communications Act were justified as a series of 'Moral Judgments' that aren't entirely dissimilar. Whilst they focus on indecent acts in pornography this could be the first step of many to control what we, as artists, can produce.