Lester Blunt is a London based artist who manipulates and re-contextualises found imagery, creating fresh meanings, new connections and breathing life into remnants of diverse pasts. He screen prints found photography, often combining it with vintage ephemera, creating unique series and editions, which present the viewer with a quasi-nostalgic look into the darker side of western culture and forces them to confront the possibility of a dystopian now. Loaded, his current long-term project, explores and examines America’s complex relationship with guns and their cultural omnipresence. He is compelled to create narratives that examine the prevalence and ubiquity of guns throughout American life.
Alongside Loaded, Blunt runs the Wasted series — an ongoing exploration of the iconography of Western drug culture, including the iconic Felix blotter acid of the 1990s, rendered in two-colour screen prints with de-bossing. His work also incorporates algorithmic and chance processes: Random Shooting uses a computer algorithm to randomly plot the positions of laser-cut holes on each print, creating a variable edition of 100 where each copy is unique and buyers receive their copy at random — the concept and the distribution method completing each other.
