Clement Valla

I treat existing artifacts, existing site conditions, or market relationships as programmable systems.  When my programs run their course, inherent contradictions and absurd situations result from the very structure of the system itself.

Highway billboards employ a limited vocabulary to produce variations of a simple message. This simple message is meant to entice consumption.  McDunCo is a program that endlessly recombines the elements of highway signs–shape, size, background colors, fonts, images, brand names, slogans–to push the inherent logic of the system to the point of irrationality. The resulting signs are both familiar and foreign, rational and surreal.

100USD, 90USD, 60USD, uses 3 'Oil-Painting Factories' in Xiamen, China that typically reproduce canonical Western Paintings, though they also create custom portraits from digital files. An image generated by McDunCo was sent via email to these 3 factories; each produced a painting of the image. The resulting artifacts provoke the idea that a copy is in fact an original.

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