land property/technology power
It has become customary to introduce exhibitions of fan Howard's work with lengthy preambles focussing on art produced up to twenty-five years ago. This is testament to the single-mindedness with which he has pursued and continues to pursue the pervasive influence of the military-industrial complex on contemporary life.
Howard's first exhibition at a commercial gallery in Brisbane expanded upon this frame of reference to deal with 'economic, cultural and political developments that occur inevitably within the context of the land, landscape and property'. The ambitious nature of the undertaking was matched by the scale of the works. Twenty-two large billboard-type images made up the bulk of the show. Howard transferred 35 mm slides of his own work (based on earlier photographs, sculptures and installations) onto a heavy duty vinyl using a computer printing system developed by Metromedia Technologies. These were then collaged with fragments of discarded billboard advertisements (shots of Coke bottles, pristine forests, road accident victims, luxury cars) resulting in a series of discreet, though multi-panelled paintings.
The fragmented perspectives and juxtaposition of images Howard employs simulate the form and style of contemporary billboard advertising, the like of which is produced by Metromedia for multinational corporations and is distributed to a burgeoning market in both Australia and abroad. In this respect his use of all-too-familiar techniques may be read as an attempt to decolonise a form of electronic imagining originally developed by the United States to document the Vietnam war and now open to accelerated and more widespread dissemination through recent developments in digitalised technologies.
The granular surface of the images thus drew attention to the artificiality of the image-its distance from reality and its positioning as an imaginary