Panacea is a collection of photographic based work that was created over the past six years. With this collection I am interested in modern understandings of the natural world and how that compares to the way western society approaches its immediate consumer environment. It’s important for me to compare established idealist utopian ways of representing the landscape to the hyper-perfect way products and modern consumer life are represented in media. I’m particularly interested in the idea of disillusionment through false or misleading representation.

I work digitally combining images of fabricated and artificial flora and fauna with commercially produced and processed products. I look at how these seemingly unrelated and absurd groupings or composites begin to address attitudes and understandings of the contemporary experience. I represent the natural world through completely unnatural elements to speak metaphorically and symbolically of our mental separation from what is “real” and compare and contrast this with the consumer world we surround ourselves with as a consequence. Ultimately this work is an investigation into the manipulation of truth.



Jason DeMarte