My name is Malik John-Marc Purvis, a third-generation black artist from Chicago in the South Shore area. I attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign graduating in 2016 with two degrees in Studio Art concentrating in Painting and New Media. I am soon to finish my degree at Cranbrook Academy of Art this May.

I am primarily an image-maker, though an unorthodox one; I start inversely with an image and then break it down. I ask questions related to how it’s seen, felt, experienced, and functions in existing discourse. As the world has grown to be more connnected, so has its sense of imagery. Being that the cultural relevance of images are timeless it allows us to explore many avenues of thought which I exploit in my work.

Though I do not see the experience of images as a set of ideal worlds, in common culture they are often seen as such and treated as separate languages of their own. As such, the bulk of my work explores the genres of painting, photography, video work and sometimes sculpture. Through this, I use reflections, color systems and established tropes of animation (such as emanata and squeans) to question our relationship with social media, surveillance, disparate identities and critique what purpose they serve in a society thoroughly dependent on images to live in the world.

Through these questions, I hope to not only further, dissect and diversify images, but invite the viewer to question how images affect their everyday behaviors, their relationships and themselves.