Ian Monroe’s themes relate to illusory space and function; the trompe l’oeil effect one gets through perspective and texture of material. His series of vast collages depicting a range of stacked and piled stereo speakers – the kind your parents played the Bee Gees through in the 1970s, encased in wood veneer – have an architectural quality reminiscent of long urban avenues, or vistas through an abandoned warehouse. Their sense of boxy physicality is built up through texture – lino, carpet, sticky-backed plastic, paper – lending a cartoonish, slightly claustrophobic feel that also plays with notions of volume. You’d be deafened of course if all of these speakers actually worked.
Source: Alison Roberts, The Observer