Andrew Best
"My photographic practice looks towards the everyday environment, but also to video games, films, fashion photography, and other flat and screen-based realities. This is also the case for my sculptures, paintings and collages – as any representation must include these parallel worlds to seem properly believable to me. These alternate realities take up a good deal of my attention, and to a large extent my making sense of the world comes from them. I have the need to turn very everyday elements into somewhat fantastical scenarios – ‘atoms’ of new stories. This is a way of restructuring the world, but also to make it more sympathetic to how many of us experience reality today; as seen through the lenses of many subtle, highly mediated images.
The Psychedelic Experiment was an attempt to physically locate these other experiences, by allowing the models to experiment with drugs in a range of public environments. Other works use techniques from cinema. The Fall Series developed from sculptural works that made solid (and perhaps more complex) the video games I played as a child, whilst collages such as Bammer Cuz directly use pop cultural media. Booey draws from video platform games, films, art historical references, and a psychological sense of unease.
(Andrew Best 2007)
