I'm trying to trick people into thinking about the unthinkable by using pop culture images.
I don't do my best work while I'm in therapy. I'm too onto myself immediately seeing meanings in things and more likely to censor myself. I'd rather find images I don't understand. That's what generates the work.
Popular culture isn't a freeze-frame; it is images zapping by in rapid-fire succession, which is why collage is such an effective way of representing contemporary life. The blur between images creates a kind of motion in the mind.
Indeed, it is measure of how little we know about Cleopatra that the only images of her are either the coins she struck, bearing very unflattering official portraits of her, or some doubtful busts, which may be of other women imitating her coiffure.
Musically, there's a movement called the flatted fifth that's really evil-sounding. It was outlawed by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. That movement is what gives you a real evil sound that conjures up dark, fantastic images. It's like an audio horror movie. It personifies what a horror movie is about.
I've found even after nearly 30 years of doing this, there are all kinds of new surprises that rear their heads at various times and I truly believe that 51% of the images, success takes place in the darkroom.
When language was not transcendental enough to complete the meaning of a revelation, symbols were relied upon for heavenly teaching, and familiar images, chosen from the known, were made to mirror the unknown spiritual truth.
No one reads anything. They just look at images.
From the start, I used a different kind of girl in Nars campaign images. My choice to use models of colour such as Alek Wek, Naomi Campbell and Karen Park Goude was absolutely a deliberate one. I felt that makeup was universal and should apply to everybody.
My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat - or in film's case 'run on' - manifests my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing.
In the U.S., oddly, we have images of men as arrogant and aggressive.
You've got to work. You've got to want an audience to sit forward in their chairs sometimes, rather than sit back and be bombarded with images.
Back then people closed their eyes and listened to music. Today there's a lot of images that go with the music. A lot of music is crap and it's all commercial and the images are all trying to sell the record.
I wanted to escape Small Town U.S.A. To dismiss the boundaries, to explore. My life experience came from watching movies, TV, and reading books and magazines. When your culture comes from watching TV everyday, you're bombarded with images of things that seem cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and careers and opportunities.
I like creating images.
My poems were just kind of all over the place. They had no focus, no location, nothing. Kind of a series of images that could have been set anywhere. A lot of the poems were just exercises for myself.
TV gives everyone an image, but radio gives birth to a million images in a million brains.
In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.
It's incredible, but I think a lot of people it shot over their heads 'cause they're used to just getting images and messing around with them, and for us to do something quite so 'designed' was a bit of a shock.
As a visual storyteller, a lot is learning what to include so you're not being redundant between images and text.
We've fallen down on our responsibility to our children by somehow creating this world where they're surrounded by images of sexuality; and yet, we as adults struggle to talk to kids honestly about sex, the rules of dignity and consent.
When I climb into my car, I enter my destination into a GPS device, whose spatial memory supplants my own. I have photographs to store the images I want to remember, books to store knowledge and now, thanks to Google, I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind's collective memory.
The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.
People should never worship images. The spread of mental darkness is due to the prevalence of idolatry.
Celebrities do look different in real life from our images of them - there is a big gap. And that is what my work is about: the gap between the image and the celebrity themselves.
Let's face it - think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth?
Imagery is not past but present. It rests with what we call our mental processes to place these images in a temporal order.
In the next couple of years, part of every film's process is going to be to adjust the images. And it'll be to change the color of an actor's tie or change the little smirky thing he's doing with his mouth. Or you can put in more clouds or move the tree a little bit.
Warhol's images made sense to me, although I knew nothing at the time of his background in commercial art. To be honest, I didn't think about him a hell of a lot.
Images have a unique power to impart that which is beyond words.
When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.
I knew what it was to be uncomfortable in a movie theater watching unfolding on the screen images of myself - not me, but black people - that were uncomfortable.
I think Ingmar Bergman, Francoise Truffaut - all these people created images in my mind, beautiful pictures, I loved what was known at that time as the foreign film.
Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.
We're not that far from being able to plant images, memories, and emotional states directly into the brain.
