Insa – ‘Self Reflection is greater than Self Projection’

A new installation to be presented by INSA and open for one evening only.  I had the pleasure of being invited along to take a few snaps a few days before the opening.  The following words are from The London and Newcastle site

INSA’s latest installation work is his most obviously paradoxical to date. Having built the INSA brand reiterating issues of the female body and commodity fetishism, here, amongst a swirling cacophony of bikini clad women and chrome the audience is assured that ‘Self Reflection is greater than Self Projection’.

The abstract installation unfolds itself across the floor and wraps itself around four large walls each measuring 4 x 10 metres; the printed imagery is a maelstrom of spheres reflecting two of INSA’s iconic women thriving amongst the chaos. The optical illusion created by the digitally printed wallcovering melds the walls into one another to encircle the viewer in this alternative and disarming reality.

Alluring and grotesque in equal parts, INSA’s work once again challenges our notions of attainment and success, questioning our image and money obsessed culture and our own culpability and complicity in it. Even if we want no part in it, can we ever avoid being voyeurs of these two girls and the INSA bubble they live in?

‘Self Reflection is greater than Self Projection’ is loaded with the iconic themes familiar to INSA’s work: the idea of success and the innate conflict of whom we really are and what and who we wish to be. Glimpses of a black and white stripped background behind these spheres hint to some sort of superseded purity, albeit briefly, as the irrepressible foreground pushes its way back into focus.

It’s clear that success in this world is measured unequivocally by fame, sex, money, and beautiful women in high heels. To his considerable credit, and with no little degree of irony, INSA’s constructed reality has created an artistic brand as synonymous with attainment and success in the real world, as the oiled and pouting women depicted in his imagery.