Making the Empire Cross is an episodic series of lenticular images that bring together a heady masala of colour, contemporary socio-political events, religious mythologies, and popular literature, entertainment, and infotainment.
The images draw on animated comic pop art and styles, to examine the influence of contemporary mass media and popular culture in shaping identity, belief, history, and truth.
Use of super-saturated colour, and parodist humour, barely masks the works’ more serious themes. An increasing trend towards palatable news and infotainment make these works oddly familiar, yet fundamentally unsettling: drawing attention to the increasing sophistication of contemporary propaganda, where the lines between psychology, marketing, governance, entertainment, fact and fiction, are often blurred.
In Making the Empire Cross, the lenticular medium itself plays an integral role in the work’s discussion about the need to view our information streams critically. Lenticular images are actually comprised of two different images that have been interlaced and covered with a plastic lens. The lens enables each image to be seen separately, but only if one walks around the image to see it at varying perspectives. To see the entire picture, one must literally look at it from many different points of view.