A New Famine is an exploration into the way individualised knowledge is acquired and developed in the digital age. The culmination of a Masters research project into intuition and its function in the creative process, this body of work extends the exploration into the role intuition plays in the contemporary lived experience.
"The processes we utilise to attain intellectual currency have been dragged into the pursuit of self-discovery. In order to know oneself, a large net is cast to gather fragments of identifying data from our digital existence. An externalised digital search for information about what we like, who our friends are and accordingly, what our beliefs should be. These facts are combined to loosely formulate a concept of self. Knowledge is now a currency that is earned not from personal experience or reflection but from an ability to grasp technological interfaces and collect substantiated data. As technology pervades the everyday workings of our lives, self-reliance and autonomous thought are becoming corrupted and mistrusted. We outsource our decisions on what to eat, when to sleep, who to love, what to like and what to think. A New Famine visualises a reality in limbo between who we are and how we have come to resolve this. It reflects on the state of a society that has been trained to favour connectedness over autonomy and mistrust intuitive knowing for obtained information."
Tonee Messiah (b. 1983) graduated from Sydney College of the Arts with Honours in 2004. She is represented in the collections of Artbank, Monash University Museum of Art, Allens Linklaters, Barker College and Campbelltown Hospital.
A New Famine is Messiah's ninth solo exhibition at Gallery 9.
