Ian Page is looking for what the outside world looks like in relation to the inside. At his final presentation at the Rijksakademie in 2021, he showed a film set with the Colosseum in Rome painted on it. Behind the screen was a lounge room with sofa and a film he made in a California training camp where American soldiers were being trained to fight in Iraq. A staged detonation of a car bomb, groaning wounded and shooting soldiers made the footage very realistic until everyone stood up as if by magic and it was clear that the 'real' was not real.
In the exhibition 'We say we saw last less and now we see may more', Ian Page elaborates on a theme that could be described as what is now very much in use among Dutch politicians, namely “with the knowledge of today we then would have acted differently”.
Ian Page is also an author and writes short essays describing miraculous situations such as in YSL (2019), a publication in which, among other things, a car tire is inflated with perfume instead of just air. He says about his lyrics that they are more 'extreme' than 'surreal' for him. Perhaps that also applies to his visual work and installations.
Ian Page (1988, Los Angeles, USA) was a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam from 2019-2021. He took part in several group exhibitions at Galerie van Gelder, such as the 'Slaap Lekker Show' in 2019. Right now his solo exhibition 'Mein Innenhof / My Patio – He Do The Police In Different Voices' is on show in Kunstmuseum Bochum, Germany. Ian Page lives and works in Los Angeles, United States.