Born in 1991 and raised under the soft glow of spinning strip mall signs in the swelling suburbs of Western Canadian prairies. Spending scorching summer evenings riding bikes in circles in Wal-Mart parking lots and vaporizing McDonalds milkshakes with house-made explosives. Eventually the soul of the big-box community concept began to envelop him, just as gentrification took over the borough he grew up in. After studying Cultural Studies at the University of Calgary and Photography at the Alberta College of Art and Design – Kyle Berger now resides in Toronto, Ontario where he basks under the warm light of the golden arches. Kyles formal photographic standpoint is derived within a contemporary hot and fast media ingestion status-quo. People only have seconds worth of interest, so Kyle creates a sense of bemusement and immediate emotional resonance via doctored imagery.
The Time is Now
The Time is Now is a collection of images created to mock a sense of hyper-normalization towards the obscene. We live in a culture of boiling hot modes of communication, a McLuhan wet dream, where memes – being the newest cultural wave of communication are merely derivatives of random bottom of the barrel twitter sensations turned into full blown pay-television news broadcasts (think about how Tide-Pods are now locked behind glass at your local Walgreens). We live in a time of blatant, widely accepted and pardonable misuse of content in order to sway opinion to facilitate the powers that be. The Time is now is a cute, playful, and sometimes scary retelling of this narrative. Where what you see – you are most likely experiencing on the internet, is what you see. Is it real? does it matter? As long as it makes you consider certain aspects of the way you ingest media, and look at the world around you, I have won.
To view more of Kyle Berger’s work please visit his website.