Phantasmal Gallery
Phantasmal Gallery
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ARTIST · URBAN NIGHTMARE · MAY 2026
BUFFERING IDENTITY
Digital collage, glitch-based digital painting
2025
50 x 50 cm
£300
This work explores the city as a destabilising system rather than a physical place—an environment where identity is constantly processed, interrupted, and distorted. Using a glitch-based Y2K visual language, the piece reflects the feeling of being watched, rendered, and misread within an urban digital landscape shaped by surveillance, repetition, and decay. The figure exists in a fragmented state of selfhood, shifting between presence and disappearance, as if the city is continuously failing to fully load them. Urban space becomes psychological rather than geographical—an emotional loop where the self is both performer and data. Within the context of Urban Nightmare, the work engages with the uncanny nature of contemporary city life: liminal, mediated, and quietly hostile, where even identity feels like it is under constant reconstruction.
A Little Bit About The Artist
A Statement From The Artist
I make work that explores the city as a psychological and unstable system rather than a fixed physical space. Through glitch-based digital collage and Y2K aesthetics, I construct fragmented self-portraits that reflect how identity is shaped, distorted, and constantly “rendered” under urban surveillance and digital overload. My practice draws on horror, liminal spaces, and early internet visual language to express emotional states such as disconnection, repetition, and erasure. The city becomes a looping environment where the self is both observed and misread, existing between presence and disappearance. In Urban Nightmare, I’m interested in how contemporary urban life feels increasingly mediated—where memory, body, and identity behave like unstable data. My work uses these visual breakdowns to explore what it means to exist inside systems that are always watching, always processing, but never fully resolving.
Do you like scary movies? And if so which ones?
Yes — I like scary movies, especially ones that feel psychological or digital rather than just gore-heavy. I’m drawn to films where the horror comes from perception breaking down, identity becoming unstable, or something feeling “off” in a familiar space. Stuff like *The Ring*, *Pulse*, *Perfect Blue*, and *Under the Skin* really influence me because they sit in that liminal, uncanny place where media, surveillance, and identity blur together. For me, the best horror is the kind that lingers in your head rather than just jumps at you.
Who or what is the biggest influence in your practice?
My biggest influences come from early internet aesthetics, Y2K digital culture, and glitch-based visual language, especially the way they reflect fragmentation and distortion in identity. I’m also heavily influenced by horror films and psychological thrillers where the fear comes from perception breaking down rather than something physical or obvious. Visually, I’m drawn to surveillance imagery, video game interfaces, and liminal urban spaces—places that feel both familiar and unreal at the same time. I’m interested in how the city can feel like a system that is constantly watching, processing, and misreading you. A lot of my work also comes from personal and emotional states—grief, detachment, and repetition—and how those feelings translate into digital environments where the self can feel like it’s constantly buffering or being re-rendered.
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