The Simple Life Karen Cantuq

The Simple Life’ by Karen Cantuq (Mexico) is a wonderful and mockingly playful composition incongruously placing a posing Astronaut in a featureless monochromatic field with two sheep sitting impassively in the otherworldly figure’s presence.

The complexity of the spaceman’s gear, built to sustain life in the most hostile environment imaginable to humans, set against such timeless rural simplicity, makes for a fascinating juxtaposition of subject and surroundings.

The piece invites us to meditate on the artificial landscape we inhabit, not merely in the physical sense but in the social context in which we live our lives, lives we increasingly experience through the medium of smart devices. The image appears to metaphorically suggest that we no longer feel comfortable and, in fact, feel vulnerability without the protective cocoon of technology, as if occupying some inhospitable world that we can only interface with using an impersonal App.