Charlie Kininmonth aka River Monkey

http://rivermonkey.tumblr.com/

My long-standing infatuation with colour and light manifests through me as photography, drawing and more recently, stencil art. I began my artistic journey using vintage camera equipment to obtain stylized nostalgic images in an attempt to capture the world around me not as it is, but how one remembers it; enhanced, saturated, soft and distorted.

I find it fascinating how our consciousness shapes our recollection of experience and I like both emulate this in my photography and enhance it through performance art and projection. The latter incorporates dynamic fractal based music sensitive visualisations layered in with my photography. I also enjoy creating spaces at festivals, be they for our own amusement, communal art space, or simply putting on character based performances throughout a 3-day festival.

I strive to create an ambiance of creative absurdity, embracing the bizarre and anarchic and encouraging communal involvement. Taking a leaf from Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters I find great satisfaction in creating spectacles that don’t all together make sense, but encourage passers by to think more carefully about the world we live in. I personally feel that expectations constrain experience and that by twisting people’s expectations they are encouraged to step away from them and experience more. I want my audience to walk away with bright, vivid, surreal memories that almost seem too bizarre to be true.