Meet the Artist & Curator of Retro Specs:

J.E. Doye has been creating from her everyday life, for most of her life. Predominately she is self taught, however, she studied fine arts at the University of Western Sydney and received some artistic direction early on from Australian pop artist Richard Larter, who supplied her with the materials that she began experimenting with artistically. In her art practice she attempts to maintain an authenticity by primarily referencing that which comes directly from her own circumstances and experience, merging art and imagination with the realities of her everyday life. For this reason her work deals with issues of memory, consciousness, identity and individualism on a personal level and as it relates in society as a whole. Despite the seriousness realised through some of these issues, she attempts to address them light heartedly and with humour, through self parody….All of that sounds a bit heavy, it’s true, although really, I just like making stuff and looking at stuff other people have made and I don’t want to get more caught up in the reasons for doing it, than just doing it, as it comes, as that’s how it really happens…:)….

What the eyeballs did…

“I’ve created a series of works based on a collage drawing and the inspiration for it as recorded in my art diary, these are from 1994/1995, when I was 16/17 years old..

The concept behind the original work was individualism, the individualism was represented by eyes as they are always completely unique to each individual, the way they look and the way they see. At the time a revolution of individualism was burgeoning, largely thanks to ‘Grunge’ and I was a grunge kid, it seemed real to me and I could relate…the future looked bright, anyone could just be what they are and that was fine…um…anyway, shit happened….

I was pretty idealistic at that age and had fallen in love with the escapism and boundlessness of expressing imagination artistically without restraint and I had this kind of fascination with creating a wormhole through art by depicting the everyday in the context of fine art, later I realised that these concepts can be aligned with fluxus and the situationist idea of mapping ‘psychogeography’…I saw these early works of mine as stepping stones I guess and I experimented artistically a lot, the symbolism in the work reflected my outside world, but as art, my inner world as well and the ultimate goal was always to merge the two…art and life, one and the same, and that can attempt to be achieved by creating an interplay between the two, making art from life and life from art….I was always just doing that as part of my everyday, without really considering where it would lead.

Many of the ideas represented in the original collage went on to form the conceptual basis for future projects years later, something I didn’t entirely realise until I dusted this off after more than a decade in storage. The work I’ve created depicts the initial inspiration for the original work with reflection and commentary on what these ideas helped me ‘see’ later in life.”