This afternoon, it
really is my pleasure to introduce Chris Dorland. Now a lot of you know that
I, myself, became interested in digital art
and digital media, or what we used
to call new media art, when I was in grad school
in 1993, so it's been a minute. That was when we started
to read in the newspaper about this thing called
the internet and the world wide web. And I got interested
in virtual reality. I started reading all
these, what the called, cyberpunk novels, a
genre of science fiction,
including novels
by Neal Stephenson. He wrote this one
called Snow Crash. That you may have heard
of called Neuromancer, by a Canadian author
William Gibson. They imagined the
internet as this-- William Gibson called it a
consensual hallucination, but as a kind of virtual world. But now some people, including
Chris, call the Metaverse. I think Facebook also calls
it the Metaverse, right? Yeah. But as this immersive world
that you would navigate, almost sort of flying through space. As it turned
out, it became
more like a bunch of pages that you would click through. And then, increasingly, we
saw more and more video. But at that time, in
the mid and late 1990s, artists all over the
world, myself included, were really excited by the
potential of the internet as a new space in which
artists could do stuff. Make art, share art,
stage interventions, and I think a lot of
us, myself included, had the sense that it was
about to change everything. All kinds of interactions,
and the way that peo
ple communicated, and did business,
and entertain themselves. We couldn't have really foreseen
things like swipe right, swipe left to meet people. In any case, my interests
have gotten broader but I've remained
interested in the term that I think really
that has stuck is digital art, ever since. And it was with that enduring
interest that I noticed a panel discussion at the
gallery Lyles and King on the Lower East
Side, taking place I think it was in August
last summer, maybe late July. Hot New
York summer, there were
all these fires up in Canada. The streets were full of, not
only smoke, but literally-- I remember going down to
Henry street, wherever Lyles and King
is, and there were ashes floating through the air. And I was thinking, OK, there's
not going to be anybody here. It was Chris Dorland,
another artist whose work I'm
really interested in, Rachel Rossin, and
then the third one I hadn't heard of, and an art
historian from Montclair State University, I think, right? The editor-
at-large
at The Brooklyn Rail. And the editor-at-large
at The Brooklyn Rail. What was her name? Charlotte Kent. Charlotte Kent, right, thanks. And Pieter Schoolwerth. OK, Peter-- Schoolwerth. --Schoolwerth. So three artists and a art
historian, editor, curator. Should talk about
this show that was up at Lyles and King, which was
also really interesting which I won't go into. But I was really
surprised that the room, by the time the start had
rolled around, was packed, was really full. How do you
get the gallery to
fill up with people on a Friday night, in the end of July,
when half of New York seems to be out of
town fleeing heat? It was a sign to
me that there was a lot of interest in Chris's
work, and Rachel's work, and Pieter's work. And I thought at the
end of that panel to invite Chris because I've
been interested in his work for quite a while. But I also just
noticed how much he seemed to have to say, in a
good way, both through his work and also with words, and what
a good commu
nicator he is. I know a lot of you are
painting but are also interested in the
way that painting intersects with other art forms,
and digital media in general. So I feel like his
work is going to be relevant for a lot of you. Chris Dorland is a
Canadian American artist, who lives and works
here in New York City. He makes paintings. I might call them prints,
but flat works that are made with a UV
printer, that function in some ways like paintings. Installations and
screen based works that explore
the ways in which
machines perceive the world, record it, and reproduce
it, or represent it through data visualization,
scanning machines, and optics, different kinds of lenses
and computer vision. He's been busy these
last several years with solo exhibitions at Lyle's
and King, at Super Dakota in Brussels. Is it Nicola Robert or
Nicolas Robert in Montreal? I guess depending, both? Is he anglophone? I don't know. OK, anyways. Robert. Robert? OK. Nicoletti Contemporary,
guess that's in London? Y
eah. Museo Nacional de Bellas
Artes in Santiago, Chile; Impacto in Lima, Peru;
Winkleman Gallery, may it rest in peace, here
in New York, good gallery; Rhona Hoffman
Gallery in Chicago; Marc Selwyn Fine Art
in LA; and Wendy Cooper Gallery in Chicago. A bunch of group shows including
at the University of Exeter in the UK; Kraftwerk,
Berlin; Annka Kultys gallery; and the Wrong Biennale,
which is online; the Museum of Contemporary
digital art, MoCDA, also online; PM/AM in London;
the Cleveland Trie
nnial for Contemporary Art in
Ohio; Carriage Trade, here in New York; the Code
Art Fair in Copenhagen; OSMOS in New York. You guys will remember
Felipe Mujica's presentation, and he was introduced
by Christian of OSMOS. And his show was at OSMOS. Martos Gallery in LA; Anonymous
Gallery in Mexico City; Marianne Boesky here in
New York, along with I-20; the Suburban in
Oak Park, Illinois; the Neuberger Museum at
Purchase; and Gavin Brown's Passerby which
was, at one point, pretty much the coolest
bar in New York City. Maybe, I don't know,
it was a cool one. His work has been supported
by Canada Council for the Arts twice by the Pollock-Krasner
Foundation, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and Marie Walsh
Sharpe Art Foundation. His work's been
reviewed and discussed in The Brooklyn Rail, Two Coats
of Paint, Frieze, ARTnews, artcritical, Collector Daily,
Elephant, The New York Times, The Verge, and PAPER Magazine. His work is in the collections
of the Whitney Museum, the Bronx Museum, the Neuberg
er
Museum, the Juilliard School, and the Sigg Art Foundation,
an important private collection in Switzerland. He is represented by three
galleries, Lyles and King here in New York, Super Dakota
in Brussels and Nicoletti in London. And he also serves as
director-at-large at Magenta Plains, very cool gallery
in the Lower East Side. He earned a BFA in painting
from Purchase of the State University of New York. Please join me giving a warm
welcome to Chris Dorland. Thank you all and
thank you, Mark.
That was a really nice
and generous introduction. There's a couple
of things I just wanted to start when
we had a blank screen. And just give you guys a
little bit of background on myself, and how I came to
be here in front of you guys today. I guess first and
foremost, I could say I've been obsessed
with the idea of the future ever since I was a little kid. I don't know why, I don't
really know where it came from. Thinking about it this
week, putting together the presentation, I think
the myth
of the future is something that has lived
as alongside capitalism, and it's sort of in our psyche. And my development,
I'm hitting-- this is like a 20 year mark. What we're going to look
at is about 20 years of painting from my
earliest development, when I was probably even maybe
younger than you guys, in my early 20s, up until now. And I came of age as a kid
in the 80s into the 90s, and I feel sort of always
being aware of the future. As a little kid I was really
excited about what the future
would be and would become. And seeing the future
present itself in the present was really exciting to me. And I feel like my
artistic development happens within
the last 20 years, and me moving to New York. And basically while I was
in school, 9/11 happened. 10 years later, not even,
the financial crisis happened, which
some of you may be too young to have
fully experienced it, but it was like incredible. All of a sudden banks were
going out of business, left and right. And it was a real moment
of, oh my God, this system is so fragile. And then the pandemic. So it's in light of that, that
artistic development really happens, is with these 20 years
of major shocks to the system. And, in some ways, the vision
or the myth of the future is no longer really
an optimistic one. It's kind of a terrifying one. As a kid who really always
wanted to live in the future, I feel like I live in the
future and it's freaks me out. And the last thing I just
want to say is about painting. So I've always r
eally heavily
identified as a painter. I think at this point,
I operate in an expanded field of painting, meaning
that I work with video, I work with installation. But everything that I'm
going to show you guys really is through the lens
of a painting sensibility and someone who's really
thought a lot about painting, how to make a painting. I think of myself as
a technical painter, meaning that I create
a system for myself as a way to make images. And then I work through a point
of exhaustion, a
t which point I'm done with that
body of work and then I move on to creating
a new system. So with that, I have
a couple of images that are like how
we get to my work, and then we're just going
to go through the work. And I'm going to try to
be as quick as I can here. And Mark, if at
the 35 minute mark, you could just give me
a heads up so that I have a sense of how I'm doing. So this is before I was born. This is the Buckminster Fuller
dome, it's the biosphere. It's now a museum. But this is my
hometown of
Montreal where I grew up. This event here, this
fire is two years before I was even conceived. And this piece of
architecture was created as part of a world's fair. And I'm just going
to give you guys like a quick, brief description
because you might not know what that was. But for about 100 years, from
the turn of the 19th century through the 2000s, there
were these global events and they were called
world's fairs. And they would
happen in big cities and they were a huge
production
, architecturally. The Eiffel Tower comes
out of a world's fair. It was meant to be
a temporary thing, and it's now the
crown jewel of France. But it was really
intended to be a thing that they were going to knock
down after it was built. And the city, Montreal
where I grew up, the entire modern
infrastructure of the city was built for Expo 67, which
again, well before I was born. But the remnants still existed. And as a little kid, in the
80s, I would sort of see them and they seem to
me like t
he future. They were strange,
circular, round domes. Some of them were like blocks. And they were really
kind of powerful images, and some of the
first images I think I was aware that I
was feeling something while looking at them. This particular dome,
though, I never liked. I don't really
like round things. And it was right next
to the amusement park. And in the 80s, I have this
very, very distinct memory. I've said it numerous
times over the years in interviews and stuff. And it was just this
rusting,
rusted hunk of shit, really. And it was just sitting
there, it was abandoned. And I remember being with my
dad and saying, what is that? And he has a very dry
response and he just said, it's crap from the 70s. And that really stayed with me. It made me kind of
dislike the 70s. And also really
dislike this thing. It's another image of the dome. So the story behind
the dome is that-- it actually has a
great story, which I'll get into a little bit later. But in the 70s, they
were renovatin
g it, and they were trying
to clean it up, and it was covered
in this new plastic. And a spark went off
during the renovation, and they torched it by mistake,
and the whole thing went down in flames. Hence me, in the mid 80s, asking
my dad what it is and he's like, it's just a hunk of junk. I love this slide, it's
like a really beautiful-- I mean you can really feel
the power of that fire. Next, I'm just going to-- I have a couple of
slides of movies and I'm going to show you. I don't want to ge
t
into them and that's its own presentation. But just images that as a kid,
my parents were pretty lax and I was allowed
to watch movies. It was like the
dawn of VHS tapes. Most of the movies
I'm going to show you, I saw them between
six and eight on VHS. And they were just such
powerful images for me. And they just burnt
into my psyche. And I think to
this day, I'm still kind of working
through these images. So this is Terminator
in 1982, James Cameron. Blade Runner, also
1982, Ridley Scott. Th
is is Total Recall,
1990, Paul Verhoeven. There's three images here,
they're all Robocop from 1987. Robocop here is the only movie
I actually saw in the theater with my dad, I was
eight years old. Even as a kid, I loved this. There's this advertisement
for the future, it's this future
city that ends up, I'm not going to get
into it, but there's this advertisement for this
dystopian downtown, that shows up recurringly. And it's the future has a
silver lining, and I love that. This is David Cronen
berg,
The Fly, 1987. Manhunter, Michael Mann, 1986. Thief 1981, also Michael Mann. And I'm just going to
say with Michael Mann that there's this kind of
really painterly sensibility to his movies, that are so mood
evoking that really at a very-- I mean all these
movies in various ways had really profound influences
on how I thought of the world, but Michael Mann's visual
sensibility very, very much so. And the last thing I'm
just going to talk about, this is where I went to school. This is a mod
el of where I went
to school, which is Purchase College as Mark mentioned. And this is, again, even
before the school was created. But in 1971, the Museum of
Modern Art-- so Purchase for those of you
that may know or not, it's about 45 minutes north
of here, in Westchester, in a small town called
Purchase, New York. And it's part of
the CUNY system. and they had really,
really big vision for this to become this major
art school for New York state. And the model was
exhibited at MoMA. This is at
the
Museum of Modern Art. And major 20th
century architects were all part of designing
it, Philip Johnson, Venturi, Charles Gwathmey. And they had this idea
that a whole town would flourish around the University. But what ended up happening
is that they built the college and immediately, all
the adjacent land got bought by corporate. PepsiCo has a huge
amount of the property. And it's isolated the
school and the hope that it would sort of
flourish didn't happen. And it ended up becoming, in the
80s, a sort of a drug school. And it failed. In that sense, it was
sort of a utopian vision that really failed. Of course I went there,
in the early 2000s. But I think I learned a
lot from that experience, and from being there, and
from feeling that failure. That potential of something
that could have been, that didn't end up being. So now we're going to start with
the first kind of body of work. I've made many
paintings prior to this, but this is the first painting
that I really feel like I mad
e, that I was proud of. I was at Purchase
when I made it. And I'd been making a lot of
different kinds of painting, all of it photo based. But what happened
with this painting is that I was looking at
these images of world fairs, and I was realizing that
I grew up in a place. Suddenly, I could
connect to where I grew up by virtue
of how important that had been to the city. And I found a new way to
access that architecture. And being at Purchase,
feeling like this is a weird campus that's
kind of
both modern, but also it's not really
functioning properly. The campus is really
weird, it's super isolated. And I was just looking
at archival images and making paintings. I was making paintings of
lots of different images, but I stumbled on
this one image. And it was the Firestone
Pavilion from the 1939 New York world's fair. And these postcards and
stuff, they're really amazing. I mean there's really this
glorious vision for a utopian future. But at the time that I was
making the painting in
2000 and 2001, Firestone
was in the news because they were
dealing with a lawsuit because they realized that
they had faulty tires, and that the tires could
potentially kill people. But they did the math and
it was cheaper to just deal with people getting
injured and suing them, than it was to do
an actual recall. In that moment, I
felt like I just understood something
about capitalism, and hope, and the
future, and the past. And it felt almost
like Terminator, which is like someone from the
fu
ture coming back to the past. I felt like I could relate to
making images in a way that was really meaningful to me. And I think that's the most
important thing in an artist development, is just finding
your own meaning in things. And it's that meaning
that moves you through your career
and your commitment because that meaning is
about all there is really. So once this painting
happened it's almost like I found my voice and I just
started developing paintings. So this is a large
watercolor, The
Dome. But at this point, I no
longer hated the dome. I actually had a lot of
fondness for the dome because I started learning what it was. And it was designed by a
very visionary engineer architect called Buckminster
Fuller, who's amazing. And this is actually, I
think, the biggest dome that he invented. He sort of pioneered
the geodesic dome. And so teaching
myself how to paint at this point, this
whole body of work. This is the inside of the dome. It was also the US pavilion,
which I didn't re
alize. And it was filled
with amazing art. So you can kind of see
them as sort of abstracted in the work on paper. But there's Warhol at the top,
there's a big Jasper Johns flag, there's a Barnett Newman. And it was just amazing
to me that this thing that I had spent a lot of
my teenage years thinking is just like the dumbest
thing, in Montreal growing up, turned out to be so filled
with incredible things that I actually love,
and am interested by, and are incredibly
meaningful to me. So this is
a big work on
paper, like maybe just a little smaller
than the projection. So another thing that
really mattered to me is, as I was finding
these images, was that I didn't really
want to make anything up. I wasn't interested
in science fiction. I was interested in
archival material, and finding documents,
and then reimagining them through the language of paint. So everything here really was
either an exhibit, or a model, that I would find
images like photographs of the models, and
documentation
of the models, of the pavilions. Largely, almost everything
was world's fair related. But I would jump
around, it didn't really matter what world's fair. But the scope of
the 20th century, and just finding these
images and then breathing a totally new life into them,
and giving them new titles. This one's called,
Century City, which is a neighborhood in Los Angeles. But this was from a GM
pavilion called Futurama. What I started to
realize is that so many of these pavilions, especially
the ones
from the second half of the 20th century,
were sort of ultimately kind of paid for by
major corporations. So this is like, GM Xerox,
all the corporations that surround our lives and, in
some ways, dictate our lives. We're financing these
really imaginative visions for the future and I think
that really appealed to me, from the vantage
point of painting them in the future, when the future's
not looking so rosy really. But really I'm learning
how to paint I mean. I'm just having fun with paint. A
nd I'm just trying to
figure out how to make marks, and the shapes
are just a vehicle that I can believe in enough
to get to the task of painting. This is actually the
Milwaukee Museum, which was built in the early 2000s. But I thought the
model for it was great. It's Santiago Calatrava. Learn a lot about
architecture in the process of these paintings. At some point though, I started
feeling like the paintings-- people really liked these
paintings, I should also add. But they always they always
use the word nostalgic, which I felt for me they
weren't really nostalgic. There was something
other than that. And I wanted to distance
myself from the making. And I got a copy machine, and
the copy machine started to-- black and white laser copier. And I was always working in
Photoshop and digital media, and printing always had
a role in my methodology. But I got this printer
and the printer really took on a
life of its own. So you can see here where
I'm printing out sections and I'm painting
into them. It's not the last painting
in this body of work, but it sort of was a
breaking point for me. And-- Is this collage or transfer? These are collage on. So I'm printing out,
and I'm collaging it onto large sheets of paper,
and painting into it. And then these are
like everything else. The paintings are just straight
paintings, it's just oil paint. These are all oil paints. But as I start
collaging, it's almost like I realize that
I need to push. So I really think of
this as the last one,
and it's sort of like the
image is just fracturing. And it's the dome on fire. 0 you think back to
the earliest dome, it's sweet and representational. And now, it's like the image
is just breaking apart. And that ushers in
the next body of work, which I call Simulations. So still working
with architecture, but they're getting more
and more abstracted. And they definitely get colder
and a little more machined. I made an artist book,
the first artist book. I've made a number of
artist books since
then. And I love doing it. And this first one, which
is also called Simulations, was just this one
image of a painting, or the source material
for a painting. It's actually the green
and black painting that we looked at earlier. But I just wanted to just
keep copying it and making iterations. And I no longer wanted them
to be recognizable landscapes. And I just started on a whole
sequence of red paintings. And really getting
into the technical, like how to make something look
like a big xerox,
or a kind of silkscreen, but
I think more xerox is what I was trying to go for. And this is 100% painting. This is like an oil painting. And I developed this
technique in the studio that allowed me to mimic the
look of a xerox up to a point. So again, I mean it's
still a tabletop model but I'm really thinking of
infrared, visioning technology, surveillance technology. The images are a lot
colder and less, maybe, sentimental than the
earlier body of work. This is from a show I did
in 2008 at Rhon
a Hoffman gallery, Simulations. I had a whole sequence, I made
a lot of the red paintings. I really loved
that body of work. This was a show I did about
six months after, in New York. This is my first show in
New York at a space called Rental in Chinatown. And this show opened right
as the economic crisis was happening. So again, you guys weren't
there, like in real time. But there was this huge
auction that Damien Hirst did, where he just made
millions and millions of dollars off this auction.
And simultaneously
banks are collapsing, and it's like every other
day, like JP Morgan. And what it felt like was
that capitalism had just gone completely out of control. Like banks were
overleveraged, and it started to feel like we were
living in a Ponzi scheme. And even the government
was terrified and there were daily meetings. And they were like, oh my God,
the economy might crumble, like the biggest most
powerful economy in the world. And in real time,
for like six months, it felt like this
whole
thing is falling apart. And I'm a young artist emerging
into this super unstable feeling environment. And the show did really well,
actually, but I think for me, I started to undergo a
real crisis in my own mind. I really felt like, what
with the financial crisis was exposing-- I'll wait till I get
to the end of these. So people really
like these paintings. I tried really hard to make
them look like they were copied or they were xeroxed. And then when I found
that that's ultimately what p
eople were
like, no, no, those aren't paintings
they're printed. And that's really what
I was trying to do, but then I was really
disappointed with that. It made me want to
not keep doing that. It felt like I'd
accomplished my goal. And in light of
what was happening-- so this show opens like
literally as banks are closing. And when this show came
down, and we pretty much sold the whole show, it did well. And I just didn't want to
go back into the studio and make more of
these paintings. I reall
y felt like
there had been like I had been living
almost like a dome, in the illusion of the
capitalist space that I had grown up in, and being critical
but also really believing in an idea of the
system, in the future. And I felt like all of a
sudden, the whole thing was just cracking and glitching. And there was this like-- almost like the illusion
behind it was exposing itself. And it was really
intense moment. And I felt like I had to do-- I couldn't just keep making-- there had to be a befo
re this
and an after this moment. That if I didn't
mark it in my work, and I just didn't skip a beat,
and kept making the same work that I had been
making, that creatively I'd be really doing
myself a disservice. So I went into the
studio and what I what I really wanted was for
the aspects of capitalism, and the illusion of capitalism,
to start coming across more. And I felt like that it was
always of interest to me, but it may be I hadn't
communicated it. The work wasn't
communicating that enou
gh. People just thought, cool,
semi-abstract landscape paintings. And I just I really
needed there to be more. So I had no idea
what I was doing. It actually brought upon a
pretty complicated, couple year period In my life. So what I started to just do
were these computer drawings. And I just started
cutting pages out of books and running them
through a printer. I want I wanted
there to be humor, I wanted there to be something
more about consumerism. And I wanted them to
be dumb, actually. I fel
t like
everything I'd done up until this point
was fairly serious. And I wanted, in
my own way, to make work that had a bit
of a sense of humor, that I felt like the work didn't
have until up until that point. I was just finding dumb
books or advertising books, and then I was printing
on top of the pages. And I made hundreds of these. And my galleries hated it. They were like, what
the hell are you doing? So there were like
juxtapositions, I don't know what painting
that is on top of the LASIK a
dvertisement. And this is like 2009 or
2010, to put it in time. And there was also
a glitching that started to happen
with the scanner, like moving the
scanner around and-- what I thought of the
overlays as functioning as disruptions to these images
that we live with, constantly. We're just bombarded
by advertising. And now, with phones
and with our lives being halfway digital,
it's relentless and insane how much we interact with
various corporate entities in all facets of our life. And I was th
inking of these
as ways to speak to that or to disrupt it,
disrupt the images. This was a little
show I did with a wall vinyl and the drawings framed. So simultaneously to
doing this, I also started to work in video. And there's a body of work I'm
not really showing you guys, but in terms of how much I
disrupted my practice in order to open it up was fairly-- there really was like
a four year period of a lot of experimentation. I think in retrospect
that was really amazing. But in real time, it
was
actually pretty stressful because collectors
were frustrated, and galleries were also
confused by what I was doing. And so, video. So doing the collages,
trying to figure out how to make paintings, but
not really successfully, and starting to work in video. So this was the
first video I made called Restoration Hardware. I'm not going to show
it because of time, but I'll show another video
that was a trailer for a show. So I did a show. It was trying to bring
these various bodies of work toge
ther in 2012, maybe '13,
called PERMANENT VACATION. And I made a trailer for
that show, the function. But I felt like my
art was the trailer. So I'm going to play it. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] - Are you looking for
more meaning in your life? A sense of happiness? Are you tired of days that
blend into each other? Are you feeling the grind? Do you find yourself
sitting in traffic, feeling the heat
rising up your neck? Fighting with family members,
co-workers, or neighbors. [SCREAMING] Are you awaken night
after
night by the noise of the city? Your health and happiness
could be at risk. Chronic stress is a leading
cause of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, heartburn,
chronic pain, high blood pressure, ulcers, diabetes,
and much, much more. Maybe it's time to
get away from it all. Do you dream of a life where you
can just get up in the morning, walk to the beach,
have a fresh juice, and enjoy the sun
all day, every day? Sounds like what you
need is a vacation. [SCREAM] A permanent vacation. Chr
is Dorland,
PERMANENT VACATION. [MECHANICAL WHIRRING] [END PLAYBACK] I really like that video. And I feel like,
at that point, I was doing what I had
wanted to be doing, which was to bring humor into
the work and to really sort of dive into
also just bringing digital space into
my vocabulary. So I'm not going to show
you guys a bunch of videos, but this is just a couple
of different stills, just to give you a sense. I mean, I have made a lot
of video over the years. And this is just one example.
This is what the shows that
I was doing at that time were looking like. So it was a little painting,
there was some video, there was wall
based installations. But it always felt
like [GRUNTING],, it wasn't quite
what I wanted to be. It wasn't as succinct
as I like my work to be. And so in around
2016, I think this was like the first body
of work where I really felt like I could make paintings
that integrated everything that I was interested in. So I started printing. And this was like the
first
body of paintings where I was really actually
printing, not painting. And I was printing out
sections in the studio, using a large printer, and then
I was sewing them together. And making fairly large-- this is like 88
high by 100 wide. And again, the red is a section
of an old painting that's been scanned and it's
kind of glitching. And then there's like-- it was like a picture
that I took in the subway, from an ad that had
been ripped apart, and there's the glare
in the photograph. And this w
as a show that
I did in Brussels in 2016, called Happiness Machines. And we had half the lights out
and we blacked the windows out with plastic. And there was a video playing
with really intense sound. It was a pretty dark show. As the work evolved-- so there's no real
painting here. The most I would do is
I'd put a lot of effort into how I'd prepare the
surface before printing on it. But I started to
get more and more into how I prepared
the surface and what would happen to the images when
they
got printed on the canvas. This was in that same show
but in the basement space. So as this work
progressed along, I had this idea to
just do the same work but try printing it on metal. And that led to
a new-- basically I got the work, the piece
back from the printer and I was like, oh my God,
this is totally the way forward and immediately
stopped the stone paintings. And I started this body
of work called Alumacore. And I was printing on this
really reflective black metal. I found these archi
tectural
panels through something else. And I just love-- they
looked like the hood of a car like really, really
shiny and reflective. And I started printing
on top but leaving a lot of the black
exposed and really pushing the scanning language. And I would set up
these increasingly elaborate situations in my
studio for scanning things and how to just generate
these strange images. And almost started to think
of it as really like the most collaborative with
the machine, where I was more interest
ed
in thinking about the lens of the scanner,
the eye of the scanner, and how coldly that perceives the world. And I was using a drone. I'd get footage, drone footage,
a lot of transparencies and just really how to
technically create what I felt were machine-made images. And at the same time also
working with installation. So this was something I did, an
installation in 2017 at an art fair. And the panels were
like 4 by 8 feet and they took up a lot
of space, physically. And then I started
cutti
ng the space up using metal studs to
break up the architecture. And this. And simultaneously, I
think I also found a way to incorporate video. Having been playing with
video for like five years, I finally found a way that I
felt video really integrated really well with this
particular body of work. And so these shows
consisted of-- I did a handful
of them and it was like studs that were
cutting up space, these architectural panels
that were really intense, and then television
monitors that were
leaning around the rooms. So I'm going to just
play this one video, it's called Memory
Cortex from 2017. I was asked to be
in a GIF show that never happened but I made-- a "jif" but I call them "gifs"-- I was asked to be
in a show about GIFs and I made a couple of GIFs. And I realized like,
oh, that's the best way for these videos to
work, which is really short and fairly low tech. Silent, but really
they were punchy. And that opened up a whole
body of video work for me. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] Those t
hinking about gaming
space, and digital culture, and also the relationship
that digital space has to military space,
both through games and-- but also just through the
internet, and all of it basically, coming
out of technology that was sort of invented
through the military. And imaging systems
and how that relates to our own daily
experience in ways that we don't
really think about. OK, perfect. So this was the show that I did
in New York at Lyles and King gallery in 2018. The show was called C
ivilian. And again, sort of
thinking of civilian is the militarized term
for like non-combatants. And thinking about how-- there were studs
all over, and there were multiple screens, and
then panels, and really like this show. And I thought of this work as
relating to, or thinking of, the grid of information
that we don't see. We live our lives where
we're kind of fully hooked up to various technology. But most of us don't understand
how it works and we certainly don't really see it. We all have
the little things
in our pockets and our computers but there's all these
other networks of cables. Even the cute notion of
the cloud, which sounds like something in the sky,
but it's actually just cables running left and right. And I was thinking of
this work as speaking to those invisible
networks, or how to visiblize the invisible
networks that we don't see unless we're really looking. I'll just show a couple of
iterations of these pieces. This was a show that I did in
2019 at Nicoletti in Lo
ndon. There was a whole there was
a whole digital component to this show that I can't,
for time reasons, get into. But there was the show and then
there was the digital back end, where I built a facsimile or
back door for the gallery. And there was like
a digital experience that you could go through
and experience the show, but like entirely online. And this show coincided
with the pandemic. It opened like the
first week of 2020 and the pandemic happened,
and shut things down. And included in th
e show were,
I'm not showing them here, but there were a couple
of small paintings and they were a little
different than the Alumacore, in the sense that I didn't
have a third party fabricator printing. I had made some
paintings in my studio and I felt really
excited about them. And this show was where
I was testing them. But once the pandemic happened,
I really fully jumped into-- I had all this open time
to develop these paintings that I had just started to
glimpse at for the last show. And th
is is where I'm at now. So I'll show you
guys fairly recent, last couple of
years worth of work. And this work is probably what
I think merges digital space and painting space
most successfully, in terms of anything
that I've done so far. They're really true
to form like painting. These in particular are really
best experienced in person, where your body can relate,
like come up against the images and look at them and think
about how they are put together. This was a show I
did in 2020, 2021. A
New Day at Lyles
and King gallery. It was paintings and video. I will show you guys-- there were two
videos in that show. This is the video that I'm going
to show called Species III. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [DRONING MUSIC] [ALIEN CHATTERING] [RADIO INTERFERENCE] [PLAYBACK ENDS] I had gotten a grant to
develop that octopus. And so much of these paintings
have to do with skins. And the octopus really
was this great metaphor for the tentacular space
that is digital networks. And also, starting to think
ab
out artificial intelligence and what that might look like
if it had a form, or the goo. With these paintings, I
find myself thinking in maybe the most abstract way. Where I'm thinking, not
necessarily in clear sentences, but I'm thinking of substances,
and I'm thinking of materials, and I'm thinking of layers. The images almost
functioning like viruses. I develop everything still on
the computer for these works and I think of them
as having no bodies. And what they're
doing is they're trying to
find physical bodies
to attach themselves to. And the painting space, and
the history of painting, becomes the body that these
digital files can graft onto, almost like host bodies. And then they get to
live on in real space. But at their source,
they're really just nonexistent digital
files that are just lines of code at their essence. But then I bring them to life
by making these paintings. And that's where my role is
in conjuring the paintings, if that makes sense. And the octopus to me was r
eally
like the central nervous system of where these images
could come from. This is from a show I
did in Belgium at Super Dakota in 2021, Protocol. And these paintings function-- in some ways, I think
of them as abstractions. But they're not really abstract
because when you get up to the surfaces,
there's lines of code, there's tons of
visual information. But as a whole, they function
like these big data scrapes, is what I think of them as. This is from my most recent show
in New York at Lyles
and King in 2023, Shellcode. It's pretty thick on the tray. Yeah, as I figure
out how to make them, they seem to be getting
thicker and thicker, and more and more embodied. It's funny because
these are, like I said, the most successful
merger of digital space and physical space. But really these really
pay off in person, far more than they do in image. For works that are
part digital, I think they definitely function
much better when you're relating to them in real life. Like the ridges are gett
ing
thicker and thicker. And I also think of
these works as a metaphor for our own increasing
inability to tell the difference between reality
and digital space, or even nonreality. And it seems to
me, at least, that just seems to be a
crisis of our age, which is that reality is
disappearing, or everybody has their own reality, or
it's really up for grabs. And in their own
small way I feel like the painting's-- there's a
moment on a surface where like that's happening and the
eye fails to distin
guish. And you can't
really look at these to figure out what the
really fun games, I think, to play with the
viewer because even I forget. I'm like, wait, what,
how did that happen? Can you say any more
about marks themselves? How the scraping
is more [INAUDIBLE] that you can build up? Yeah, I like to describe
them as plastic on plastic. This is entirely
polymer based practice. It's all acrylics, and pigment,
and then some printing. And I never loved to
talk about my process. I think of painting
as the,
not quite the domain of magic, but I think that
we live in a world where it's like really
common for people to like, oh, come into my
studio, let me make a video about how I made this. And I've always preferred to
be a little more keeping that to myself. Because I think that-- and as somebody who's studied,
really, a lot of painting and really gone down rabbit
holes to try to figure out how things are made. I mean there's two
types of people. There's the people
in the world who couldn't
care less
how a thing is made, and that's most people. And then there's artists
who are fascinated with how things are made. And I think that what's
exciting is to inspire. I would hope, or that could
be a hope for these works, that like someone says like,
how the hell did he make this? This is possible to make this? And let me figure
out, if that inspires you enough to figure out
how to make a version of it. Just as a small
anecdote but there's a painter, very, very well
known painter who I kn
ow. And he has this one
body of work and I have no idea how he made them. There's some printing
involved, and I know him, and I could ask him, but
I would never ask him. Periodically, I'll
just find myself googling that body
of work and just-- how did he make these things? What is the process? And I feel like
that's how I learn. Looking in books, looking at
Richter, looking at Polke, and seeing, and
reading the materials, and just being like, OK,
like this is possible. I just have to figure
out
how to do it myself. That process is what
really gets me going. But there is, there's a ton
of paint, that gets built up, and its surfaces getting built
up, and then there's a fusing. And it's all done in studio. And I don't know
if I mentioned it, but with the other works
the Alumacore on the panels, it was the first time I had a
real fabricator making work. And I hated that process
because, A, you're doing something
else in the studio. If you love to make things with
your hands, eliminating th
at is like you don't get to
do what you love to do. But also, it's fun
to make things. And it's not fun to be a
corporate entity calling a fabricator and complaining
about the condition in which things were
received, or you know. So it was really exciting
for me to get to a point where I had figured out a way-- and I would say practically
like a 10 year process for me to want to do something
to get to where these paintings currently are,
in terms of being satisfied with the price. So here's one
where
you can really see all the little bits
of information that is packed into the paintings. That's funny, I really
find myself not even wanting to talk
about the painting. I feel like they
operate so successfully, in and of themselves,
that they don't really even need me to talk about
them, because they just do their thing and they're
pretty satisfying in there. This was something I did at
an art fair in Switzerland over the summer. And I'm actually, in
two months I'm doing-- this is me and
t
wo other artists, Yana Shimo and Yuan Li-- but I'm doing a
solo presentation where I'm going to have
this reflective floor and I'm really
excited about that. It's like really big paintings
and a super reflective floor. And so I have two more
images left that-- so in terms of the screen
based aspect of my work, I've always shown
work on monitors. And I think of them kind of
they function like paintings and it's again, it's this toggle
between software and hardware. And in painting terms,
the stre
tcher, the linen, that's the hardware and
the software is the file. And the file finds these
different homes to go live on and they come to life once
they found their hardware. And I've never projected
work that's not really of interest to me. The screen based work
has always been that, like on these physical screens. But increasingly, as I've done a
number of shows, the hardware-- just buying these TVs
that are limited in size, they can't really get that big-- has been increasingly
less interes
ting to me. And so this summer I spent a
lot of time figuring out how I could scale up the screen. And so this is the first
look, this is in my studio. But I finally figured
out a way to get a really large expandable, it
could go to any size, screen. And this has been like
a five year project to figuring this out. And I'm really,
really, really excited. This is the type of
signage you would see in Times Square, the
really, really bright. So this is some of the paintings
I'm going to be showing a
nd a version, or a side shot,
of this new screen, which I'm not quite sure
when I'm going to show that in the world. But it's been so exciting
to have that in my studio and to figure out what the
possibilities of that is. Yeah, and that concludes what
I have to tell you guys today. So thank you.
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