Grab All You Can, is a layered, intertextual work by James Wylie curated in the visual form of the PDF. As an interactive ‘stack’ of discursive visual and textual information merging public and private, Grab All You Can, is an interpretative work. A reading involves a negotiation between multiple archives created by the artist, which have been dismantled and reformatted in a fire-sale of content and additional ‘push’ and ‘pull’ operations.

The force and popularity of the online Portable Document Format is in its free and super fast distribution – whether self-published or print-to-web or online magazine – it is about accessibility. Grab All You Can, tests this discursivity as a process and platform for disseminating information, generating positions, and as prerogative of the user-as-free-agent model – beyond modes of traditional authorship. Interpretation requires the viewer to browse an integrative design that combines schematic and free-hand visual codes wherein external and internal links add to (or subvert from) constructive narrative. Content draws from diverse and adverse realms of politics, culture and communication. As Grab All You Can, creates vectors and constellations across selected slums of information and culture, one may sense that our information age is one rife with crises – of representation.

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James Wylie recently graduated with a BFA (Hons) from Elam School of Fine Arts. James is also co-founder and curator of Snake Pit. Recent group shows include Thirty Four Hundred 2012, Snake Pit, Auckland; Female Women, None Gallery, Dunedin, 2012; Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters, Personal Best, Auckland, 2011; Three Mile Island, a collaboration with David Cooper at Snake Pit, Auckland, 2011.