Amelie Mckee

Penrose Helix alludes to the theme of surveillance via the motif of the tower. Towers are landmarks, international figures that typify the idea of progress. In this sense it is no surprise that they are powerful symbols to dismantle. The United States no longer boasts the tallest towers; contemporary military superpowers send the top of the tower — the all-seeing eye — straight to space with a rocket, skipping the need for spiral staircases altogether. Down below on the surface, their market system still relies on the ascension of a staircase, the capitalist staircase can forever be climbed, without making any progress. It is based on an infinite game of inflation and deflation, where value must be diminished in order to progress. The height and depth of the tower have been reduced to a Penrose model. We are caught in a two-dimensional reality where positioning and locating oneself becomes near impossible. Ascension has become illusional, and we no longer know who the observer is and who the observed.

My work operates as a dissection of delivery systems. Long house, an industrialised birth canal, questions the commodification of babies as they are increasingly approached as an embodiment of family values and used as a vehicle to portray the self in the online realm. Pilot Solutions, a series of sculptures, is inspired by drones situated between romantic ideals of flight and dystopian war devices. The work points at debates around the increase of mechanical devices affiliated to the body and the strategy of modification that seeks to avoid surveillance technology.