Jonathan Mayhew
Autoportrait, 2017
USB flash drive containing MP3, MP4,jpeg & PDF files, everything I could find via Google and other search engines and some secrets they couldn’t find, 1 x 0.5 x 4cm
"The digital me
At the beginning of the White Album essay, Joan Didion says ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live...’. In the WEB 2.0, media saturated world we exist in, everything boils down to narratives; from the pictures we share, to the things we like and click. All these things tell stories about us. Ones we can and cannot see. I am interested in exploring how we think about data and how we use it, and in turn, how it can be used against us. So much information is flowing in, out and around us. Unimaginable amounts of money change hands at a seemingly impossible rate, making the world markets spin. Adrienne Rich’s poem ‘North American Time’ written in 1983 still feels incredibly relevant today. The line from verse two: ‘Everything we write/will be used against us/or against those we love’ now has even more impact in the world of Web 2.0, where we are the product and not the consumer, the endless content creators, and where a careless tweet could change our lives forever. Our data builds a more realistic portrait of us than we can ever imagine."
Jonathan Mayhew: Born in Dublin, Jonathan Mayhew, lives and works between Gothenburg and Dublin. He graduated from NCAD in 2005, and the MFA program there in 2007. He has exhibited in ‘digital_self’ at IMMA (2018), ‘Documentary Poetics’ at Smock Alley for The International Literature Festival Dublin (2018), ‘Pro Tempore’ at Kristiansand Kunsthall, Norway (2017), ‘The Way Things Go: An Homage’, at The Butler Gallery, Kilkenny (2017), and ‘ArtWorks 17’, at Visual Carlow (2017), He also held a solo exhibition ‘I wanted to write a poem’ in Wexford Arts Centre, Ireland, 2017, where he was the 2015 EVA award winner.