Simmons & Burke
A dynamic duo of sorts, Los Angeles-based artists Case Simmons and Andrew Buke have combined their respective passions of art and music to form the collaborative art team Simmons & Burke. By using images and accompanying audio files collected from hours of browsing the web, Simmons & Burke create art that is culturally relevant and art historically referential in its technological obsession.
The internet is a palette and sourcebook for the artists, and their work provides a breathtaking example of what technology can do for art. The pieces are meant to reflect the strong connection between digital life and real life. Borrowing from art historical references as diverse as Dadaist collage work and Surrealist nonsequitors, the detailed work is definitively a grotesque version of the Baroque, over the top and exagerated.
Assembled with meticulous pateince, their works are almost religiously passionae in their consideration of modern life’s input oveload. The images that compose their collages—mostly snapshots of people and objects taken from the internet and reproduced out of context—comes at the viewer from all directions making it difficult to zoom out and take in the entire picture.
But their peices are meant to be disorienting; using the same tools that have created a culture that is digitally dependent. The very purpose of their works in intended to reflect the sounds and images that barrage our daily lives through various forms of media.Their collage aesthetic mimics the act of web browsing, as one image source leads to another and to another in a complicated web of chance and intuition. What defines their work though, is a careful attention to composition and a devoted consideration for assembly.