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Grant Stevens travels in infinite loops. Since graduating from Brisbane's Queensland University of Technology in 2002, the predominantly video artist has referenced footage, sound and text from Hollywood's entertainment industries to circle his own territory: the personal rhythms and riffs of popular culture. Which makes Stevens's latest series of drawings, shown at Sydney's Gallery Barry Keldoulis late last year, not quite as surprising as they first appear. These ink-on-paper mandalas of pastel-coloured words radiate outwards from a central statement to a more personal musing. NO MORE MISERY, he begins one mandala, before finding enlightenment countless turns later with NO MORE RUNNING OUT OF MILK FOR BREAKFAST. Keldoulis says Stevens treads a fine line between irony and sincerity, and the artist would be the first to admit that his work seeks transcendence from the usual default positions of popular culture: 'There's like always a contradiction.'
 
With his short video works, Stevens has cut to the very quick of western culture: Hollywood. While completing his PhD on notions of editing and text, and believing Hollywood to be 'the primary myth-making place in terms of film or narrative', the artist sought to demystify it. With his animated text work, Some want it all, 2004, Stevens scrambled movie trailer spiels, subverting the semiotics of instant gratification. In Danger zone, 2003, he looped the unresolved sexual tension between Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis from the film Top Gun (1986), questioning 'the dominant ideologies that get promoted through mainstream film'. By both slowing down and speeding up the tropes of high-concept Hollywood, the artist succeeds in turning these ideologies on their head.
 
Stevens was also drawn to the pop and conceptual work of Southern Californian artists Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari, and it was only a matter of time before he crossed the Pacific to encounter the signs, symbols and sounds of the city that both attracted and repulsed him. In early 2007, Stevens took up a residency in the Australia Council for the Arts studio at Santa Monica. And during his nearly four months in Los Angeles - with its cacophony of New Age spiritualities, gyms, organic food stores and movie studios - the artist was forced to constantly edit his impressions and question his beliefs. It was his PhD subject writ large:
 
Everything you do is about cutting and pasting, or trying to work out what materials are important to you and what you can exclude. Whether it's writing a text or editing video or film or going shopping, for me it's all about the same process. The most important thing you can think about is what sort of material you're wanting to include and exclude, and then what order and what pattern or what system.

 
This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Autumn 2008 issue.