Jack Addis

Jack hails from Oxford and lived and worked for a time in Bristol having completed a BTEC in Fine Art and Photography at Abingdon College of Art and subsequently graduating with a degree in Fine Art Painting at Bath School of Art and Design in 2010. He is currently living in London, studying for a Masters degree in Fine Digital Art.

Always using technology to inform his painting, it was during his degree that he began to make sole use of computers to create his work which is now realised through screen-like one-off Perspex-fronted prints, gif animation and installations.

The technological realm is particularly relevant to Jack’s recent practice that uses the new media strategies of “datamoshing” and “glitching” to achieve a highly distinctive look, like digital collages from a cyber punk world. Addis distorts the images through layers of this systematic transformation to produce a comment on the ever- expanding nature our global digital infrastructure.

“I would class myself as a digital image-maker; the work is a mixture of photo manipulation, collage, and image glitching – building shapes and colour fields as you would with other media. It was actually quite a freeing experience in how immediate the results are without the kind of issues like drying times; it felt a lot more honest to be using a computer. I started working with film at first and by chance discovered breaks and glitches with the video files, and then moved on to working with images.

My images are about identity and information, and how we react to our environment in our current socio-political situation. We are living in a culture of machine-inspired perfection against the backdrop of inequality that pervades our lives. We are so connected to the world but at the same time just as distant as we ever were.” JA

Jack was a member of NEON, a group of like-minded artists sharing a passion and a commitment, a belief in excellence, ambition and hard work. NEON is a quest for truth and for beauty and was formed in 2012 from a small group of artists from different disciplines but similar attitudes. Fellow members were Emma Caton, Rowdy, Harry Simmonds, Marcus Lanyon, Ben Risk, Olivia Croce and Lucy Rogers.