A continuing point of interest for collaborative artists Jessie Burrows and Angela Louise Powell, and focus of their prior work in the GlogauAir residency, are the contemporary issues of privacy in the digital age. In an effort to highlight these issues within their practices, the duo created a pseudo marketing startup ‘Persuasion Architects’, in which they address how digital and physical world marketing structures and mass data surveillance are used to influence our personal and social desires, as well as behaviours. Burrows and Powell toy with the disparity between behaviour in reality to that of its online parallels. The artists utilise aspects of these social online sources to open up discussion with their audience.
Burrows and Powell often develop their practice based on previous experiences or encounters. Their work recreates understandings of these encounters, both individual and shared encounters and lived experiences together. In 2016-17 Burrows and Powell took part in the Blindside Summer Studio residency program. The program gave the artists the time to develop and conceptualise ideas they had had from experiences in foreign countries and cultures.
Burrows and Powell as well as constructing installation objects use found objects and relics, as well as documenting sites with digital media. Through the orchestration of new media and installation objects Burrows and Powell seek to subsume the viewer within a space, so the viewer can be suspended in a moment or even let it slip by. How urban infrastructure such as safety mirror affords a clear view of behind or into the peripheral space. Giving the potential to catch a moment passing by.