Name/Title
GTO Racer X I Love My Car Go-BoyEntry/Object ID
2015.02.01Description
Douglas Coupland (b. 1961) is a novelist, writer, and visual artist. He was born on a NATO base in Baden-Söllingen, Germany while his father was serving a tour overseas as a medical officer for the Royal Canadian Air Force. Around the age of four, Coupland's family would move back to Canada settling in Vancouver. He eventually attended Emily Carr University of Art and Design with a focus on sculpture. He later studied at the European Design Institute in Milan, Italy and the Hokkaido College of Art & Design in Sapporo, Japan.
Coupland's visual art practices utilize a wide range of media including assemblage, installation, painting, photography, sculpture and quilting. His works continually examine the effect of technology and pop culture on Canadian identity through large, geometric and vibrant compositions filled with Canadian symbolism and cultural references. Yet, right behind the playful pop art appearance of his images, Coupland discusses issues such as the change in the urban landscape, the sensory overstimulation from mass media, and social media surveillance. They are very much a commentary on the future based on present realities and concerns about what could be.
GTO Racer X I Love My Car Go-Boy (2014) is part of a series of digitally manipulated photographs that explore Facebook’s recent corporate initiative to identify all faces posted to their website by using facial recognition algorithms. Coupland took passport style photos of his subjects and overlaid them with colourful barcode-like patterns that mimic the way the software understands faces. The artist aimed to camouflage and distort the image such that the algorithm can no longer guess who’s in the picture.
Since 1991, Coupland has written thirteen novels published in most languages. He has written and performed for England's Royal Shakespeare Company and is a columnist for The Financial Times of London. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux, DIS and Vice. In 2000, Coupland amplified his visual art production and has recently had two separate museum retrospectives, Everything is Anything is Anywhere is Everywhere at the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam's Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, and Munich's Villa Stücke. In 2015 and 2016, Coupland was the artist in residence at the Paris Google Cultural Institute.
Coupland is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, an Officer of the Order of Canada, an Officer of the Order of British Columbia, a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and receiver of the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence.
http://www.coupland.com/about-contact/Artwork Details
Medium
acrylic on archival pigment paper