Sam Derounian shows screen-prints combining natural and industrial imagery entangled with the human figure, and set within hand-painted environments.
The exhibition, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, deals with themes of humans’ relationship with technology and its effects on wellbeing and self-perception, taking its name from a lecture by the British educational Philosopher, Ken Robinson. Robinson compared educational models of the contemporary western world to those of industry, opining that they should more ideally resemble those of horticulture, if students were to thrive and develop.
Derounian applies Robinson’s ideas about development and wellbeing in the context of this body of work for the exhibition; His allegorical images explore the atomizing and isolating effects of the ubiquity of technology and the negation of nature on the individual – psychologically, socially, politically, and philosophically – in the series.