James Howard was born in 1981 in Canterbury and studied fine art at Reading University and the Royal Academy Schools.

Howard’s works depict the sleazy and dodgy side of world-wide-web advertising which offers all types of products to satisfy the consumer’s need, greed, desire and fantasy. For example, one can acquire hugely discounted drugs (most of them perform dubious functions), find Chinese brides, get rid of debts, communicate with the deceased, purchase snacks or even strollers for one’s dog so that his or her beloved pet can “sit comfortably… and not run out of breath”!

Using highly complicated digital techniques, Howard creates fake posters, internet websites and videos selling bogus products. These digitally produced works are brightly coloured, some of them show glossy sophistication whilst the others appear as cheap as the goods they intend to flog. Howard’s art is both dark and humorous, it occupies a very specific currency in light of recent global trends. Together with the badly constructed English sentences and occasionally terribly translated foreign texts, the digital work highlights the insatiable greed coming from the vendors as well as the consumers and above all, it offers a fascinating survey of the Zeitgeist.

Howard's influence come from the place beneath the glare of the computer screen, from the unregulated realms of the internet, where all things safe, banal and shocking exist in the same place. Howard creates a world where adverts grapple for space, where funny, touching and sometimes disturbing juxtapositions occur, and ultimately, the viewer's attention is sought. This world is all too fammilliar in current times, and is only a click away.