Visual Propaganda #6: Joseph Staples
Vancouver-based artist Joseph Staples shows recent work inspired by a fan-fictional affair between Lana Del Rey and Paul Walker
Joseph Staples is a Vancouver-based artist that primarily produces collages that interrogate our relationship with and love of images, and the manner in which we use images to build a marketable identity or the all proverbial “brand.” Initially getting interested in visual production as a crime addled graffiti artist (just kidding about the crime-addled part), Staples went on to get an MFA. Nevertheless, his relationship with the world of contemporary art is complicated and nebulous.
Staples’ most recent series and works are largely inspired by fan-fictional narratives concerning Lana Del Rey and the late Fast and the Furious actor Paul Walker. In both of these celebrities, we see masters of the self-constructed and media proliferated image. In Lana, we have an icon of nostalgia, Americana, rebellion, sexuality, and apolitical cool – an antidote to a pop culture laced in shallow propaganda. Walker, on the other hand, died in a vehicular crash, thereby solidifying the very image he had cultivated as the star of The Fast and the Furious franchise; a James Dean for liquid modernity. Staples’ images comment on the ineffable “deep/fake,” and ask: can a deep/fake emerge from a place of love and adulation? “Collage as a whole could easily be seen as immoral through current critical theory’s dark and dreary lens that makes the worst assumptions of anyone and imagining any actions worst consequences,” says Staples. “I’m trying to dig out a new space built on fandom’s idea of irrational love.”
Joseph Staples, we welcome you. A new recruit to the ever-growing ranks of the COUNTER-AGENCY of the AVANT-GARDE. – Adam Lehrer