Akwetey John

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

Akwetey John Orraca-Tetteh (°1980, New York, United States) is an artist who works in digital painting, 3d sculpture, and computer based applications. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, John formalizes and emphasizes the conscious process of composition that is behind his tech based work. Through time-based and algorithmic mediums, his work concerns the mediation of the self in the age of technological advancement. Employing late musician and scholar Yusef Lateef’s belief in the “auto-physio-psychic” current of creation, Akwetey's subjective processes are unfiltered in their references to virtual dream worlds and orbit around notions of the supernatural--transmuted through instinct and expressed through lyrical digital painting techniques, 3D rendered prints , and automated computer applications. In choosing mainly formal tech-based cues, Akwetey is pulled by the points at which ancestral, cultural and digital memories collide and reorganize contemporary visual language. By experimenting with organic and automatic processes, Akwetey develops works that are based on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations both on and offline. Ultimately, the artist is compelled by mechanisms, both photographic and imagined, that mediate and "un-encrypt" the digitally conscious eye.

Artwork