Robbie Penford Baker: Untitled collage 1, 2012

JDA:
This is nice. Wait. One second. Let me look at it again. Well, there certainly is a lot of white going on. Oh no. It’s an off white. The only colour house paint that is available in the Tesco Value is a similar shade I believe. There are one and a half people in the piece of art. The complete person is climbing up a rock face, this presumably relates to one of the following:

1. A sense of transcendence
2. Liberation from male hierarchy
3. Getting back in touch with nature and escaping western society which is of course ironic because her bikini is clearly from H&M
4. Maybe she is looking into the void, as in the void of death.
5. Maybe her lover died some years ago at this spot
6. It could be a reference to that infamously unknown Van Gogh piece “Woman on Rockface, Half Man Rising"

Vincent 'Vinnie' V.G., creator of 'Woman on Rockface, Half Man Rising'

DJR:
There seems to be an unspoken rule nowadays about collage; how to make it, what geometric shapes to use.
The go-to shape for everything is the triangle, of course. But what we have here is the off-triangle: a circle, seemingly raised off the paper with digital trickery. So it’s actually not paper. It’s just digital. This collage wasn’t even worth going to the stationary section in Tesco for.

If this collage would have been presented in poetry form, it would be one and a half helvetica words slapped on an emoticon, and the emoticon would be a sad face, as it would know that it’s just another throw-away gesture in a succession of throw-away gestures in conversations in empty chatrooms, in which the protagonists end their sentences with a hollow LOL.

JDA:
The half person is within an empty void or maybe sitting on a slim black bench. This presumably relates to:
0.5-Personal experiences of the artist (probably a vegetarian) with trying to avoid anemia and ending up sunburnt
1.0-Fears relating to male pattern baldness, or emotions relating to their father struggle with male pattern baldness
1.5-A soviet-esque desire to create a society that is a complete work of art, manifesting itself mostly through avant-garde outside seating
2.0-It is possible that the man actually lacks both legs and his left arm (if it is a man, I should not make such cis-gendered assumptions). If this is a case maybe we should be talking about the 0.4 of a person.
2.4-It is perhaps wrong to assume that it is a person at all.
2.8- Maybe it is an orang-utan that has been shaved save for it’s head?
3.2-It could also be a Ron Mueck sculpture.

DJR:
By the confident use of the off-white I would guess the artist is a vegan rather than a vegetarian. Or maybe this wasn’t actually created by a human at all, but by an algorithm? An algorithm written on a Macbook pro, intel i5 chipset, 4GB of RAM. We all know that virtual dreams are woven on Macs nowadays. Hardly anyone uses Linux to traverse the cyberdreamscape.
Or maybe it’s just a new filter option of Instagram? Maybe we just overlooked the sign-in button on that ‘collage’, I mean, have you tried pressing on that circle with your cursor/finger? Can I use my facebook account to log in? Will I be able to share this with my friends?

All in all I have to say that this is probably the best version of Angry Birds I have seen.
5 out of 5 Internet Explorer Stars for this App!

Ron Mueck: 'Frowny Face', life sized (silicone, pigment), 2011