Description
Besides being a successful artist designing some of the most iconic album covers in rock and pop music. Egan was also an extremely successful music video director, directing somewhere in the region of 100 videos. He was at the height of his success as a director in the late 1990’s early 2000’s when MTV ruled the land and every household in America had it on 24 hours a day. It became a creative force during this period, something that record labels did not expect, this sudden cultural phenomenon grew so quickly that there weren’t enough directors to direct the hundreds of videos needing to be made, so record labels looked outside of Film Directors and Film students to other areas of creativity like Photographers, Fine Artists, and Album Cover Designers. Egan’s first commission was for Iggy Pop’s ‘Real Wild Child’ from the album Blah Blah Blah of which Egan designed the cover.
It wasn’t long before Egan’s name was on every other music video breaking bands like Oasis, Alanis Morisette, The Soup Dragons and re introducing Duran Duran with their hit ‘Ordinary World’ His work included INXS, Kylie Minogue, Belinda Carlisle, Sonic Youth and many more.
Egan wanted to approach this artwork in a completely different way to anything else he has done, he wanted it to take on the shape of a 90’s TV set put in a Baroque frame to show its importance as an art form and let the images come alive with a flickering back lit effect This is a montage of Egan’s videos printed on vellum paper and treated with brush strokes and glitter, in certain areas, to accentuate the colours sandwiched between clear Perspex and lit from behind by a voice activated LED lighting strip. The idea was to create the flickering effect of a cathode ray TV set. This Is a homage to that career at the height of the music video era, where music videos had become the new artform.
I Want my MTV was a slogan used by MTV and this is a parody of that. In the early 2000’s MTV turned to reality TV and videos lost their importance in popular culture. so the slogan is a cry for MTV to reestablish itself back into a music based leader again.
