CONSUMED

Monique Motut-Firth’s meticulously composed works are created through a process of clipping images and diagrams from found magazine collections, which she deconstructs and reconfigures into new iconographies. Motut-Firth creates compositions that build on the history of collage and explore the language and role of technical images. In her work, photographic materials are transformed into structures, then into pixels, and finally into singular printed-paper images.

Colour and line speak from within the images to reveal possible hybrid visualizations and new trajectories of meaning. The artist’s “scrap-systems” are at once chaotic yet organized, limitless yet confined. A tension is created as discarded and forgotten images of consumer products are transformed into unique contemporary pieces. Using her scissors to mine vast image archives, consumed by the act of cutting countless images, Motut-Firth navigates an overwhelming and endless abyss of advertisements and print-media—an undeniable physical manifestation of the excess of capitalist culture. With incessant global marketing, extreme consumerism, and the plentiful accumulation of products, society is clearly adopting increasingly materialistic values that ultimately distract from more meaningful intrinsic ones. Motut-Firth’s work considers the tendency to slip into a passive viewing position and sheds light on the perils of images in mass media.