Sticky Fingers

I was delighted to exhibit a new series of digital prints in an exhibition at the BLINK Gallery in Ottawa. Entitled Sticky Fingers, the prints are based on tracks from the legendary Rolling Stones record. Each print in the series is an unlikely collage juxtaposing images, colours and texts that I have sourced from internet searches using the title of each song on the Sticky Fingers album, from “Brown Sugar” to “Moonlight Mile.” The resulting compositions are fragmentary, displaying snatches of each song’s lyrics only to dislocate them from their original context and create artworks that are more abstract and ambiguous.

Michael Davidge, Cool Cool Hand (Sister Morphine), 2016, digital print.

The Rolling Stones copied the Blues to create their own music and I copied and pasted (digitally) from the Stones to create my own artworks, with knowing reference to the colloquial meaning of the phrase “Sticky Fingers.” The resulting series of prints participates in a long tradition of using popular music and pop culture to construct one’s identity. Each collage maker steals preexisting content and rearranges it to create something new that speaks with his or her own voice.