Ian Tweedy. 70 Zeppelins

Ian Tweedy (Hahn, 1982), born and raised on an American military base in Germany, bases his artistic research on the analysis of the relationship between individual biography and collective memory, on the subjective appropriation of history and, more generally, on reflection around the concepts of identity, belonging and freedom.

All of Tweedy’s works originate from the transposition of images from his ever-growing personal archive. “What I do,” said the artist in a recent interview, “is simply incorporate my archive into my daily life. On the one hand I let myself be influenced by these images, on the other hand I bend and construct the truths these images convey to fit my own truth.”

Through the use of different media – from drawing to collage, from installation to video – Tweedy interprets reality as an expression of a fluid superposition of memories and images. The use of different media in painting, which bear traces of a more or less recent past – such as book covers, pages of old magazines, support surfaces, rags used to clean brushes – is functional to this type of vision of time and history.

The experience of graffiti art contributed greatly to the formation of Tweedy’s thinking. In urban space, each image is subjected to a process of visual juxtaposition capable of modifying its perception and thus its ultimate meaning. Every urban image is placed side by side with a context of signs that pre-exist the image itself and overlap it. Just as in Tweedy’s work, writings and wall paintings carry within them the signs of previous histories and last until another writing or another image modifies them, superimposing itself on them.

EX3’s exhibition, curated by Lorenzo Giusti and Arabella Natalini,  revolves around the installation 70 Zeppelins, consisting of seventy different drawings depicting images of airships. Each drawing is made on a different print medium, which gives the drawn image a new meaning. In the artist’s imagination, the airship comes to constitute an element of great expressive and symbolic value, linked to the history of the First World War, the idea of progress and travel literature.

Completing 70 Zeppelins will be a large site-specific work, created in one of the two wings of EX3.