Marc Bridger
Visual Artist

Biography

 

Marc Bridger (b. 1971, United States) received a B.F.A. in studio art from The University of South Florida (USF) in 2015. Bridger graduated with a Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) in Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in August 2020. In 2021, Bridger began a graduate program in education.

Dab Art is currently exhibiting Bridger's work on Artsy: Art in the Time of Corona. Relatedly, group exhibitions include participatory creation of Reciprocidad Andina—an art project for Miami's Creative Time Summit. After high-school, Bridger served in the U.S. Navy as an avionics technician that led to writing and design in the airport consulting field. Bridger worked in various technology roles for twenty years, including the ownership of a business providing design, web, and technical support. The 2008 economic recession initiated a career transition into the arts, while Bridger's technological expertise continues to inform his art practice and discourse. Bridger's paintings interrogate the propagandistic recursion within the hyperreal metaverse where precarious environmental, social, and political conditions subjugate humanity via a commodity driven existence. Last summer, Bridger filmed and documented an adjustable aluminum stretcher-bar system he developed for artists. Subsequently, he published the work as an educational resource and written guide that included a video tutorial with 3D modeling and animations. Bridger donated the assets to the larger art community via FloridaStretchers.org. Bridger completed numerous works throughout the past year, while the latest highlights metaverse absurdity in Pair of Dise (2019-20)—a work presented in his M.F.A.Thesis Exhibition: Metaverse Gaze. Last July, Bridger finalized his written M.F.A. thesis: Externalities of the Metaverse Gaze, subsequently graduating in August. Within the thesis, Bridger articulated the conceptual notion of a metaverse artform—an auto-exhibiting emergent amalgam that transcends the digital and physical art object, enfranchising an experience mediated by the device.

Artist Statement

The metaverse encapsulates the confluence of our virtual, digital, and physical existences. As realities collide to become the metaverse, new meaning forms infiltrate our spaces armed with a lexicon of innuendo and fragments. Fragments recursively reconstructing our existence as a domain governed by bits. My work probes this verse through scatter and fracture, while wielding propaganda's anterior language of oil painting. Surface reticulations in paint handling intertwine formal and conceptual concerns, forming allegorical constructs of alterity that mine messages from our fragmented digital sphere. The stylistic hatches and bands are enmeshed with personal figurative images, centering the discourse on our metaverse and its emergent gaze. A conversation examining the precarity of global social conditions that subjugate humanity through a commodity driven existence. My latest thesis work employs a conceptual fusion via the metaverse artform—an auto-exhibiting synthesis that transcends the digital and physical art object. This complex emergent amalgam mirrors our mobius-strip metaverse, enfranchising an experience mediated by the device.

Trajectory

Space Invaders is the current expression of these concerns in a body of work where imaginative plots and the McDonald's crew reemerge as celebrity signifiers; while ideology, technology, and cultural tensions become hostile invaders. The ongoing vilification of immigrants are frictions that envelop my multiracial and multicultural family. In response, ideological assaults are anthropomorphized into storied collages that mine messages from our fragmented digital world, transforming them into varied trajectories and angles of perspective. Quantum physics yields metaphoric support; while identity, absurdity, and nostalgia are ferment for manufactured conflict. The formal and conceptual method of constructing the artificial painted object directly links to the artificial humanistic constructions of nationalism, racism, and ethnocentrism. Constructions altered in recent history that now jeopardize the egalitarian existences for families of diversity. These concerns manifest via spatial insertions, painting forms, and binary hatches. Hatches that suffuse into microcosms of hue and value revealing vibrant glints of versicolor—the same luculent tones within all people that exist in, on, and underneath the tissue thin layer associated with race. Thus, Space Invaders amalgamates figurative subjects, spectacle, and metaverse milieu with consumerism, political vicinities, and corporate antagonism; yielding an invasion of these cultural conditions into our most private spaces.