2022, Bett Gallery, Hobart
‘Shadow Moves’ sees painterly gesture filtered through digital process to reflect upon the capture of human movement within the context of automation. The process of making these works involves the isolation and restaging of bodily traces to explore what abstractions occur when human movement is parcelled out as data. The paintings all start from a place of spontaneity: I make abstract marks on the surface. I then photograph and isolate the gestural marks, altering it via CG animation and rendering before working that double back into the painting. This work seeks to mimic a process whereby spontaneous movement—the very spark of being alive—is framed as a site of extraction. Illusionistic painting and digital figuration are knitted together to explore a networked realm where living and inanimate properties dance together.
In these works, the velocity and illusory precision of digital technologies are both mirrored and made to slow down, dragged into the messy, material, embodied space of painting. The conspicuous re-staging of painterly gesture brings networked conditions into sharp focus: the bodily trace meets itself in altered form, emphasising both the ease with which it can be digitally manipulated and recombined and the shadows it casts in the wake of that transformation.
Related texts:
Diego Ramirez, ‘Mimicking Life’, Art Collector Magazine, October – December 2022, p.162-166
