Grad Show 2022
This series of paintings describe the transverse feeling of inhabiting both our online and offline spaces, and the sensory and mental overload of rapidly switching from one to the other. My canvas offers familiar Web-like graphics, and then interrupts them: with no assigned compositional hierarchy, the layers cut and disrupt one another, achievening the most human tendency tech shows: a glitch, a computer bug, a lag.
Mouse Miles, 2022
Spray paint on canvas, 130x195cm
The decisive linear traction across the patterned, dissonant layers cuts a one-dimensional gash over the vast, hyper-dimensional sprawl of the virtual. It is a compression of time and space when we surf online, when we search a query, when we scroll ad infinitum. Our screen presence, however, is easily measured, horizontally tracked and vertically scrolled. Faced with the continuous surface manipulation, we are similarly drawn in and pushed out in all directions of the imposing canvas.
Exponential, 2022
Spray paint on canvas, 100 x 130cm
With consistently faster transistors and higher resolutions, our physical reality is becoming indiscernible from a virtual one at an exponential rate. Here the noise-filled, static-like, monochrome plane is forcefully transformed into another colour format, into a higher resolution. In the spaces where tech progress meets its format predecessor, the glitch is summoned to point to the incoherent edges of the Information Age.
Vertigo, 2021
Spray paint on canvas, 90 x 60cm
It takes a moment for reality to crystallise in full sensory capacity as one turns off their screen. The more our virtual and offline lives interlace, the more of a Pavlovian response we develop to the digital. The screen’s incessant attraction punctuates our visual perception, hooking us with instant gratification, and holding our focus in flux: neither here nor there. Represented by a warm brightness is the “there” we are trained to reach for, peeking through the pixelated curtain of moiré interference drizzling over the canvas’ flatness.
Missing Data, 2022
Spray paint on canvas, 97 x 146cm
A glitch manifests as a noise in an audio or visual signal, demonstrating the most human-like tendency a technology can have: one to err. The vertical lines cutting through the composition imitate a corrupt .jpg image, yet offer no pictorial sense: the shapes that come in and out of the distortion are echoes of pixels, fragments of an image file that can be everywhere and nowhere. Its imperfect rendering, the missing resolution suggests a corrupted format, a hard-lived digital life.
SOLD
Undo (Ctrl + Z), 2022
Spray paint on canvas, 97 x 146cm
The Undo function negates the last command done on a computer interface. With it we gain timelessness, a licence to be messy and take risks while interacting with software. Created as a physical ode to digital graphics, Undo neatly layers attractive patterns but forgoes any compositional hierarchy: the planes obscure and cut into one another, scraped off in playful “eraser” marks. With no steps backwards to go, the canvas is preserving the illusion of perpetuity by being limited: a disrupted arrangement, a permanent transient state.
Not Responding (Beachball), 2022
Spray paint on canvas, 97 x 146cm
When faced with a whirling colourful ball “loader” cursor on a Mac OS interface, you are being beachballed - frustratingly, comically put on hold by software. Likewise, this piece throws a colourful pixelated ball at you: suspended in an air-tight space of bursting forms, cutting planes and shifting display mechanisms, it is begging to be looked at, registered as it bleeds. The round form’s pigmentation and velocity is shocking us into a wider focus, asking us to reexamine our busyness and our intent.
Doomscroll, 2022
Spray paint on canvas, 100 x 130cm
Doomscrolling is the activity of mindlessly sifting through negative news cycles. It is a media anxiety in times of real-world shattering events. The catastrophic and the tragic is endlessly reported next to the upbeat and the endearing, requiring an equally large emotional bandwidth. The visual information here is overloading, variably intensifying, moving at different speeds around our visual axis. The superimposed “X” sign mimics a real-world window shattering prevention in war-affected areas, often done in brown postal tape.