Collection

In his work Holes, the artist examines various ways of diffusing images which contain extreme scenes of violence, aggression, and decomposing corpses. Price shows found footage from the Internet on a monitor placed in a cardboard box designed to transport and sell a television. He thus re-processes and “re-packages” the visual material, while underlining how the impact of images of gore and violence is ambivalent and context-dependent. The artist has transformed the attributes of the material found online, recirculating it to be witnessed by a different audience. In this way, he suggests that the impact of the images is intensified or lessened by the media format and distribution method. Shocking video material found accidentally by a user in the virtual yet intimate space of a website is more disturbing than material taken out of its original context and placed into a safe gallery space as an installation. Moreover, the cardboard box and the materiality of the “video sculpture” imply a turnover of both visuals and commodities, since violent images are now distributed as works of art worth considerable amounts of money.