Byron Eksteen, The Machine in My Head, AVA New Media Room

After a traumatic head injury which left him in a coma, self-taught artist Byron Eksteen had to relearn how to make sense of the world and in doing so immersed himself in creative expression. From music to writing, painting to drawing, Eksteen experiments relentlessly with shapes form and colour to capture the rhythms and patterns that inspire him.

"The world inside my head changed dramatically and therefore created a new obsessive analytical quest to investigate metaphysical ideas such as time, love, war, chance, death, rebirth, euphoria, emptiness, hate and the notion of success occurred. As part of my brain’s self-defence mechanism, it subconsciously processed, translated and stored the bombardment of my new reality into shapes, colours, and rhythms."

Focusing largely on abstraction, Eksteen works autonomously by creating works which have no discernible beginning or end. They are rather the translation of the thoughts and feelings in his mind made visible for the viewer to lose themselves in. "I understand my work as a language that speaks through me, to me, then to the viewer...the power of translation is within the eye, and mind of the viewer."

Eksteen’s body of multimedia work will be on exhibition in the New Media Room from 23 January-27 February 2020.