JESSIE RUTLEDGE

From the series "History of the Present".

We must abandon the sovereign notion of self. That is to say, the self that comes from the centralised governing paradigm of bourgeois thinking. One of desire and intensity, the rapture of consumption, the Sadio-masochistic thrill of inequality, and the addictive engagement of the identity project in the forlorn and disastrous belief that things will get better. We have two options. To give in, creating a “product” that everybody gets but nobody wants, or we can seek the notion of self from the post-apocalypse, the post-human. A shared experience of radical identity politics that prioritises poiesis over techne. What we know to be true over what we are told is true. 

My work is a collage-based visual enquiry into an unrecorded, working-class notion of self. I use the open grammar of collage and the potential of the digital to provide a progressive form of identity politics that advances the cause of a post-human expression of self.