2023, Lon Gallery, Naarm
Bad Actors, LON Gallery 26 July - 19 August. Bad Actors is an exhibition of paintings that continue the artist’s investigation into how subjecthood is distilled and reanimated via algorithmic processes.
To be a bad actor in a theatrical sense is to fudge the role: to overact or take the viewer out of the scene. A bad actor in a moral context conjures a person or group with dubious motives. Annika Koops’ forthcoming exhibition re-stages painterly gestures to toy with the reciprocity between these meanings in the context of digital environments.
The paintings are a combination of spontaneous, abstract brushwork that is digitally modelled and run through simulations and rendering before being re-painted: bringing the original marks into contact with densely mediated versions of themselves. The spatial disorientation in the paintings reflect the privileging of appearances and rhetorical grift typical of online environments: when it is not possible to tell if something is made by a machine or human, the bad actor is both distant and ever present.
Read the catalogue essay by Hilary Thurlow HERE
