Ivan Stojakovic’s paintings and digital prints visually disrupt the ideological positivism of science. Images appropriated from biotechnology, bioinformatics and nanotechnology, are emptied of scientific meaning and deployed as compositional elements. Intuitively dispersed across largely ambiguous visual fields, these signs no longer read as emblems of rationality and order. The densely layered compositions capture the inaccessibility of contemporary scientific knowledge for most of the population. For the Global Nature series (2006), composed entirely of images appropriated from the Internet, logos and flags are added to the fray; visualizing the diffuse, rhizomatic structure of the Web, implicating science and technology in the problematic processes of nationalism and globalization.
Excerpt from a text by Murtaza Vali, a guest writer for the ‘Things Fall Apart’ exhibition brochure, Rush Arts Gallery, NY, 2007