A collaborative work at the Goldsmiths CCA that reinvents and reinterprets commonplace cultural materials, twisting our conceptualisation of the known and the unknown.
Seen and not seen, recognised yet distorted, the familiar plays freely with the uncomfortable at Majid and Newby's collaborative work, utilising found imagery from printed source materials, and social media familiarities decontextualized.
Both solo artists in their own right, Majid and Newby (both 28 years of age) are used to employing the physicality of production to add new elements, layers, and textures to their work, and here so do together in mesmerising and often perplexing fashion. For example, photographing each image using low resolution digital thermal transfer printing generates an imperceptible linear structure; a grid that is only visible when the image is enlarged and reprinted.
What's especially fascinating here is there use of meme imagery, as we are still in the infancy of artistically reconciling the memes we see on the daily basis with the art we want to see and/or produce. By forcing us to look at meme templates we have seen hundreds of times, on devices we may not even like using, the two artists are bringing the subconscious and the unacknowledged to the surface. By obfuscating their imagery with rendering the familiar strange, our common sense is questioned, our priorities interrogated, and we are forced to pay attention to what we pay attention to.