Lester Blunt

Lester manipulates and reimagines found imagery, creating fresh meanings, new connections and breathing life into remnants of diverse pasts. He screenprints, collages and constructs using found photography, often combined with vintage ephemera. He is fascinated with the visual and historical legacy that such photography contains, and how it can be re-interpreted and re-contextualised, to explore modern narratives and themes. His unique series and editions offer a quasi-nostalgic look into the darker side of western culture and asks the viewer to confront the possibility of a dystopian now. Loaded, his current long-term project, is a multi-faceted exploration of gun culture in America and involves the creation of narratives that examine the omnipresence of guns throughout American life. Clearly one of the most controversial and divisive issues in contemporary USA, he examines how the normalisation of guns in society is intertwined with the tenets of liberty, patriotism and religion. Working within the disciplines of print, collage and assemblage, he combines found photography with discarded by-products and patriotic iconography, dissecting America's complicated relationship with guns.