Humming Paradise – Joe Magee

Joe Magee is an artist whose work over many years has explored the nature of human communication, and how people interact and communicate in a digital age. The latest Ffotogallery publication accompanies the artist's current installation ''Humming Paradise''.

In this new body of work a landscape of winter trees, infected with human messages in the form of braille, breaks down in a natural process of corruption. Images of strangers, deep in thought, are caught from the windows of trains passing momentarily through a station. The passengers' faces are recast in new relationships and densely overlaid with weeds and brambles. Other images depict nettle stalks and dandelion leaves on display in glass bottles and jugs. The work evokes nature as a metaphor for human thought processes - the continuous flow of information generating ever more complex rhizomic patterns.

Joe Magee is an artist and filmmaker whose practice encompasses a range of traditional and electronic media. He began his career making images for newspapers, a regular contributor to international publications such as The Guardian, Libération, New York Times and Newsweek. Supported by the Arts Council England and UK Film Council, Magee's work has shown widely at galleries and film festivals internationally, including London, Edinburgh, Tampere and Cannes, winning several prizes. Magee twice presented work at ISEA (Japan, Liverpool) as well as at Watershed, the ICA and National Portrait Gallery.

• Size: 225mm x 225mm
• Illustration:
• Binding: Hardback 110pp
• Text: Essay by David Drake
• Weight:
• Edition:
• Publication date: July 2009
• ISBN: ISBN-10: 1 872 771 742
• Price: £14.00
• Distributor: Cornerhouse

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