In the beginning there was my face. (Listen, my co-working party said it was fine to start like this, okay? As long as I got started...)
Hello everyone my name is Shane Avery and I’m weird. Or eccentric as others would call it. Well, mostly. But I’m also a digital content creator, primarily focusing on telling stories through photoshop composite art, whether it is surreal or science fiction and speed art thereof, to short films and videos on YouTube. Stories are everything to me. Having my mind accidentally forged by James Cameron when I was 4 not realising what it was that I was seeing (Terminator 2), my mind has never stopped showing me fantastical things in the most cinematic of ways regardless of the topic.
Growing up, most of my artistic expression was suppressed by the requirement of being ‘realistic’ in life. Combining my cinematic visions with a deeply curious and technical mind, my creative suppression eventually landed me in the field of computing and primarily, programming. After 10 years of doing that I finally realised that I was just playing a role. A role that I never wanted, even though I had discovered a love for building things in code, except for the way it was done in the real world I highly disliked.
It felt off. Hollow. Empty. A repetitive void of doing something I technically loved, but knew somehow that this was not something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Little did I know at the time that this was a life of suppression about to detonate and give me a reality check in an overall positive way. I think.
2017 comes around and I make the final decision to give up the computing route. I tried and what felt like many failures later, I ended up looking for more creative routes to follow. After all, 10 years in computing, one could say I definitely gave it a fair shot. After what should have been a phone call lasting 15 minutes, I spent 45 minutes talking to someone whom I had never spoken to before in my life discussing life itself and doing the things we loved. I still don’t know what this person looks like or if she even still works at Media Design School here in Auckland.
But that conversation, my situation and how my mind felt at the time changed everything. It was then I decided I wanted to become a writer. To tell stories. To send a reader's mind into a universe much like my own did for me constantly. As time passed, photography got included into my ability to express but as more of a visual endeavour. Next came portrait work. And then, I finally landed on creating surreal composite art. This exploration has been one of the best things I’ve allowed myself to do as it gave me a chance to try different things and see which I would love to do the most. The answer was more complicated than I originally thought however.
It turns out I want to do all of the above as time allows. My primary goal was to tell stories and create visual art, but through as many mediums as I enjoyed instead of sticking to one thing. My mind just wouldn’t allow me to stay in one place, no matter how hard I tried.
Nature photography and surreal/science fiction art will be most of what you see coming from me, with occasional portraits but definitely more so cosplay photography, along with videos documenting some of my work and speed art.
This is my first time coming back to writing in a very long time since 2017-2019. So it will take me a while to get my bearings a bit, but I am excited to go through this journey of working entirely for myself and doing things that I love in terms of expression. My hope is that you will find my work intriguing enough to want to join me and see what else my mind has to offer.
Thank you for taking the time to read such a long winded introduction, but I thought some context of how I came to be here was in order. And now we can begin with the insanity.
Talk soon.