Robbie Penford Baker: Untitled Collage 2, 2012

DJR:
This untitled collage is clearly a comment on how inadequate the polygonal lasso tool is to create attractive lines, especially when half a side-boob on a pink plane is concerned.
These poorly cut out hands are, if we were able to understand sign language, gesturing repressed sexual things towards each other, but mainly their frustration about how erotica, once it enters the realm of art, cannot be used for masturbatory purposes anymore - well, at least not when it concerns anything else but the ego of the artist.

JDA:
It is nice to know that the artist owns a copy of photoshop and has some limited skill in using it. However it is regrettable that they have forgot to make clear exactly what event they are promoting. This piece is fine, it just needs some text over the top to indicate where I can go and get drunk and dance.

DJR:
I have heard that there’s a feature in the new version of Photoshop which will let you post your digital collage directly from Photoshop to Tumblr. It will, however, delete the original straight away, and also destroy the physical space on your harddrive where your collage was stored.
So instead of having the collage end up in a place where noone will look at it (recycle bin), it will be in a place where noone that matters will look at it (tumblr).

JDA:
As one of Edinburgh’s premier tumblr users I resent the suggestion that I do not matter. Tumblr is the arena in which contemporary art is flourishing, thousands of aspiring young artists doing really good drawings of friends using pencils. Whether you like it or not this is the new face of contemporary art. Down with MoMA! Down with Tate! Down with Saatchi! Long live the bold new face of contemporary art! #art! #drwaing! #pencil! #idk! 

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