Artist’s statement
Words, text, typography, and images always attracted my attention. Besides its meaning, alphabets and their form and expressiveness made me curious and digital space allowed me to push the pixels further to experiment with.
As s digital specialist in a marketing environment contextually communicated and commercially targeted use of texts and images in this ever-evolving world of the internet inspired me. Daily digital life, commercial pop culture, email subject lines, and other analytically driven situations from digital disruptions in daily life forced me to look at these words and situations from a non-consumer point of view and kind of detached from it. It made me evaluate the words, phrases, images and opted for the idea of language serving as an expressive art form.
By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of the “corporate world’, my digital artworks references contemporary consumer marketing communications as well as the socio-political situations and the intriguing logic of the capitalist market system.
Artist’s Bio
Unnikrishna M Damodaran is a Middle East-based Indian Visual Artist and Graphic designer, a native of Kerala, India graduated from College Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram.
Unnikrishna has been exploring his skills with digital art-making for several years along with his day job as a Digital Specialist for a worldwide financial payment network company. Professionally a trained graphic designer, Unni blended his advertising and communication design experience with his native vernacular intrigued visual art bringing about a perfect union of his two passions – image, text, and typography. Unni’s text-based word art with animated letter components include daily words and phrases that have two dimensions where the text denotes its ideological meaning and the text itself form the actual art.
His recent personal project One Hundred Days of Malayalam Number Portraits seeks to reveal and question the value of measuring system; where your potential and efficacy being narrowed it down to a number.
Unni’s convergence into digital art and typography allowed him to introduce a unique element to this combination and helped him further to expand his visual explorations with words and images. Unni mostly uses text, images and typography and let it grow with pixel space to challenge the boundaries of conventional typography and image making – making use of the twists and twirls of alphabetical forms to express the meaning and human character of the content, which enquire and question the communication content and its fallacies in this metaverse.