Scissors and glue. These are the original collage tools. The contemporary version could be said to be the words cut and paste, the action has superseded the object. Plenty of people have applied this to the culture that we live in; a cut-and-paste culture. Collage has become a representative for that state of cultural production. Yet it simultaneously transcends it. It offers an alternative to an ever-shifting, ever-fluid image world and reminds people of tactility, texture, and the reality of the world we live in; a unique approach that visual art can offer that digital media does not convey. It’s a way to experience information simultaneously, as if surrounded by an illustrative cloud.

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This material practice produces imaginary landscape realised in the digital realm. Kian Benson Bailes has generated spaces that are both historically permanent yet totally transient, something which is effected by the relationship queer identity has with authority; in tern producing queer architecture. This is an investigation of queer genealogies built from formal architectural references and queer conceptual practices. When exploring these distinct environments one can feel the tension between the familiar, the found, and the edited and its connection with high and low brow culture.

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The DIY nature of the collage shines through the glossy screen and we can feel a certain accessibility that usually one would find when viewing materials that are found or discarded quite readily. It’s this transient nature and lack of preciousness that enable the contexts surrounding queer narratives to evolve.

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Kian Benson Bailes is interested in the investigation of queer spaces past, present and future and their relationship with present queer identity.

He explores issues regarding authenticity and commodification, juxtaposed within mainstream heteronormativity and access of these spaces through post millennial technology as a vehicle for research and “experience”.

Material and digital construction of new narratives and exploration of narratives that are ephemeral or temporary, engagement with unstable and transmutable concepts surrounding identity and its construction and deconstruction through a process based practice.