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Critique

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Create two completed paintings (one large and one smaller)

Get IPO up to date

Workbook up to date too

Find artist precedents

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Monday, 7 April: Crit Notes

Key Words: gooey, warping

Pixelated deer and the drip on the wall are contrasting, like the pixels are leaking into something more fluid

Texture- the texture on the deer painting is jarring, works better in the underdeveloped spine painting

The texture is more balanced in the spine painting

Texture makes it feel more like a realm, a place that is not real

They are opposite but in a cohesive way

What ties them in are creatures in a negative space

Composition of the deer- blown up, like a blown up image in a Google slide presentation

The image(s) become something else

Spine painting has a deep sea vibe

The paintings look as if they have different processes- they start off similar but I think adding the texture paste creates a whole new process I am unfamiliar with, which means experimenting more with techniques

At this point of the critique, the identification of the spine was brought up

Although less digital, the flatness of the background still gives the illusion of a digital realm

MRI scan

Cut out forms, janky cut outs

Floating from the original state

Play with MRI and more digital/medical imagery

Create liminal paintings

Layering with canvas, push my ideas more with the surfaces I paint on and how I present my work

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Started sketching the vertebrae for my paintings. This will be a series of five paintings, four of which will be the spine parts, and one smaller painting that will be of one of my tattoos. This tattoo is a symbol of my use of the internet, and how this has literally been inked into my skin, it has manifested into my body.

Painting Observations:

Sketched the spine vertebrae that I intend to paint, and sorted the surface and support I will paint on

Wooden panels x 4, 400mm x 500mm

One smaller panel of the tattoo that is seperate to the series but still in the same vain

The colours will contrast, as the spine vertebrae will be white/yellow/green against a deep blue background and the tattoo painting will have a light background with the colour of the tattoo ink against it.

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Finish this small series of works before exhibition

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Monday, 10 March

Goals:

Paint

Start new painting ideas

Research and writing

Have a clear understanding of my IPO

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Monday, 17 March

Goals:

Complete a work to present in critique week 5

IPO

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Start paintings- finish the spine painting

Find place to install for final

Research artist precedents

Refine workbook

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Exhibit works in gallery✨

Research artist precedents

Start planning and making/ prepping new painting(s) for final summative

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Monday, 26 May

Goals:

finish final painting for this semester

Update workbook

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Monday, 24 feb

Goals:

Start painting- sketch and edited image made during the sumemr break

Start new workbook

Research for IPO

Plan ideas and moodboard

Visit library- find books

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IPO/Intent

Lecture notes

Workshop evidence

Process/thinking- photos, writings and reflections, experimentations, drawings, materiality, documentations

Research- reaedings, artist references, images, sketches, texts, links, films, library, social media, observations, conversations

Crit notes and reflections on them

Notes on conversations with lecturers

Images of the works I make in the semester and the process

Documentation of exhibitions

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Brainstorming Ideas:

Continue with themes from last year

Critiquing internet and media culture- the everyday horror of our lives being intertwined with the internet and the ordinary

Collections and the act of collecting?

materiality and the loss of physical media

overconsumption and the constant exsposure to media in daily life?

obscurities, online and through painting

Impliment ideas surrpounding exhibition- themes of personal experiences, storytelling, personal identity etc

Combining personal aspects of my life with the digital aspects of my life through painting- continue with a soft paitning technique

Intent

I will be investigating ideas around the entanglement of internet imagery and scenes of daily life, and how we are constantly intertwining ourselves with the mundane horrors of the unknown. It is often too, that both the internet imagery we stumble across, and the mundane aspects of life are casted to the void, never to be revisited again.

When uploading an image online, what does it become? There is an intrinsic oddity about them, they carry a sort of an anomaly presence. Essentially, they become another artefact of proof of our current existence as humans. Same goes for our everyday objects, and the moments we often look over or are forgotten. I intend to eternalise both the fleeting, unknown imagery found online, and capturing moments from my life, whether through memory or quick photographs. This will be done through painting, a soft technique to capture the blurry moments of life, and the imagery from the internet will be embedded either through a collage-like system or overlaid. I am yet to experiment with the idea of layering canvas, or to layer over paint.

To justify the reasoning behind painting these images is to "concrete" their existence outside the internet, and outside my personal experience. Both images and my lived experiences are made from layers of "distortion", they have a history of being in multiple places at once.

Paintings are not any different to both digital images and daily moments in life. During the painting process, we build up layers of paint and ideas, they build the image that is being protrayed, creating a still captured within the likes of paint. Digital images carry movement, and both digital images and painitngs hold that of the likes of an artefact. A painting is moveing in creation, and a digital image is always being created. But even so, the meaning of a painting can be different for everyone, and its meaning for the creator can change too. I intend to create a series of works- three during the first half of the semester, five during the break and ten during the last half of the semster.

Background

Majority of my works from last semester surrounded themes of internet culture, internet consumption and my personal experiences with the internet through the lens of nostalgia. I started off exploring the idea that two images can exist in different states of being at once; one digital and one through the material of paint.

It became more of a personal endeavour towards the end of the semester, and how these digital imags evoked a new feeling of nostalgia.

I am interested in how many of these images, like the objects in our life, are catered to the human, the "end all be all" state of existence. I became fascinated with how this is all many aspects of life have been reduced to this notion, and what their existence means without the imput of human intervention; they rely on us, as much as we rely on them. Essentially, these digital images and objects of daily life act as an abstracted form of human identity.

This semester, I intend to develop this notion, but entangle my personal experiences and relationships with objects in my life and images from the internet, as they amalgamate into my identity. Both internet usage, and personal lived experiences are a trace of human existence, as we begin to rely on technology more frequently. It is resisting the push for AI in many asapects of our internet usage,as we begin to interact more and more with AI. The dead internet theory, one that believes the internet is made of interactions of AI, as creators create content for an anlgorithm, rather than human interaction. The internet too, is now becoming a place that upholds voices of right-wing ideology, and has become a hostile place for any minority.

By painting themes around the internet, I am investigating a love-letter of what once was, "fan art" of the past, and the lasting grasps of enjoyment I have for the internet.

With this, I intend to push forward an investigative approach to how digital images have had an influence in contemporary art spaces, and how other artists are translating digital media into painting. I will be taking digital images from the internet, similar to that of last semester, and placing them out of context from one another, creating a meaning that is indescribable. Taking these images out of context creates another layer of idiocy. Humour and absurdities are aspects of contemporary art I am interested in, and want to continue creating art that can evoke feelings of confusion. I also want to recognise the horror within this, the idea that our lives coexist with our digital self.

Method and Resources

My current method of making revolves around a digital process, and one that retrives memories and observing the mundane aspects of life, such as the condensation on the glass in the shower, or creases in the sheets, or the insignificant frames in a movie scene. I want to combine these aspects of the tangible in my life, to the aspects of digital mundanity, such as Googling my symptoms of pain, or even an advertisement that catches my eye for a brief moment. Combining the unknown with the familiar.

I will capture moments in my life, and place them with the digital, sometimes they could be indesiferable from another.

The digital images will be edited in photoshop in any way, and sometimes be recognisable to the viewer.

With the references made, I will cast a copy of the image using a rough sketch first, then paint through layers of oil painting. With the painting, I intend to mimic a low-resolution style that includes harsh outlines of the subjects. This is to not only to mimic the style created through the editing through photoshop, but also create a personal style in relation to the images, rather than copying them exactly.

I will use oil painting as the medium, and will paint on canvas. How I organise a display to paint the subject is yet to be decided, whether I stick to the style of collage I previously investigated, or to paint one image on one canvas etc…

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Monday, 3 March

Goals:

Start painting

Research and take notes on library sources

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Photos capturing wired headphone sculpture

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Take photos of object in various spaces and positions

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Used only words that started with the letter 'C'.

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Mixed red and blue, making 50% of each colour, 25% blue and 25% red, then 25% red and 75% blue. I alternated the different mixes with a pattern that represented my headphones from the photos earlier.

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These are edits for my painting. The image is a stock photo of a deer, and I used the content aware scale tool to edit and compress the image in photoshop.

The deer is an animal that symbolises to me, fragility and I often have videos of deer come across my social media feeds.

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David Hockney

https://www.myartbroker.com/artist-david-hockney/articles/exploring-david-hockney's-joiners

David Hockney is a prolific contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s. In the early 1980s, Hockney explored techniques within photo collage, naming them ‘joiners’. This was formed through his dissatisfaction with the limitations of traditional photography and its confinement to one perspective. His initial inspiration behind this was his observations on how we perceive the world around us- never a single frozen moment, but an amalgamation of views, perspectives and moments. Hockney’s joiners are ‘mosaics of photographs to form a cohesive image’. It transcends the traditional perspectives of both photography and painting, and allows for dynamic methods of representation, encompassing fluidity and multiplicities of seeing.

Despite being made from physically laying out polaroid and film photographs, they have a digital quality to them. This could be due to the slight distorted and warped views of the subject matter, or the angular placement of each perspective.

Execution- This technique involves arranging multiple photographs to create a single composite image. The subject matter usually follows along the lines of a family member, a living room or landscape; something familiar. Yet, we are able to view such a familiar scene with perspectives of “space and time”. Hockney takes multiple photographs from different angles and perspectives and focus on various details of the scene. He embraces the edges and disjointed aspects of the individual cut outs, thus forcing a new perspective of the subject.

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Lecture Notes:

Clement Verger- French artist and researcher

Circumnavigations 2016- 2025

Endeavour- Impact of Cook’s voyages on landscapes

Portugal residency

Question the landscape around us, and the human influence, how this has changed the landscape

Forest fires, and lack of biodiversity

Navigation motifs

Images of trees and landscapes

Collections- sampling (over 300-400 samples)

More diversity in Australia, compared to Europe

Make own frames- burnt frames- working on paper and using materials that are not considered ‘fine art’- from a distance appears classic, but holds detail

Resolution- The Norfolk Pine- from the Norfolk Island- Ship building and the importance of the Royal Navy

Oriental Bay- they are planted around the bay

Used to be rare

Bought Norfolk pines and labelled purchase date, price etc

Discovery- finishing the project

The death of Cook (1779)

Prints on mulberry paper- used in tapa making

Frames are iron, heavy af

Irony- introduced materials new to the Pacific islands- iron

Killed by an iron dagger- ironic

Growing gourds- finding seeds from over the world

Impact of the first Europeans completely changed the biodiversity

Citrus fruits- planted , a reflection of scurvy and a tool for colonisation, to stay at sea longer

Seeds spontaneously grew- unique

Retracing the survey of Cook’s botanist, the final stages

Soil and volcanic soil- other planets

Ending on something that could develop into a bigger project

Currently in Aotearoa looking at native trees

Questions-

Scanning plant samples W

Works are technical and scientific- installations have the plants themselves

Phases of human intervention- the landscapes, the good/bad

Black and white images- published pamphlets that were easy to access

Retracing colonisation and retrace indigenous people and how they were affected by the changing of landscapes- a form of decolonisation

Complex narratives- cantering self, and reflect on personhood

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Curated by Curaterofscreams- Aaron Lister and Chelsea Nichols

An overlap of contemporary art and horror films which engages with the discourse of complex and conceptual art practices

How horror aspects can infiltrate the gallery space and how to create a space that carries that energy

Expands what the art experience can be- collaboration with film makers and composers

Based on The Brood by David Cronenberg- used as a metaphorical concept for the show

The metaphor is based on the idea of putting forward young/ new artists into the world

Counters a ‘traditional’ emerging artist show by utilising darker themes

NZ has a tradition of the gothic, dark Aotearoa- explores a new generation of NZ gothic artists

Theo MacDonald, Cujo 2

rabies and a personal story based on own experiences

About the intricate cries of bureaucracies- trapped in the horror of capitalism

Artist made fake blood and dog suit

Mother-child dynamic within the film

Filmed on super-8- family film quality

No direct themes to horror

Grace Crothall, DREAMS

drawings from old photographs

From the church, having ‘cult-like’ aspects of the church

Has an ambivalent relationship to the church and Catholicism

In horror and pop culture- religious trauma

The aesthetics of modern belief institutions

Intervention with the sculptural aspect of the room

Still dream-like and nostalgic

Iann An, Bed Marrow

sculptural works- similar to the substance

The works grow and change over time and fester

A metaphor for our own bodies

Tumours

Body horror and prosthetics

Objects of play- the basketball hoop and the stuffed toy creatures- the heart motifs found sparingly around each sculpture

A mutated baby nursery

Hatchlings

Nathan Taare, Olfactory Ghost

scent and different notes- audio, scent focused work which is interesting as I haven’t experienced anything like this before

Plastic and latex

Mushroom, damp earthy notes- to me smells like decomposition

Smells like a grandmother’s home

Cassie Freeth, Manticore

Manticore and Frankenstein

Performance work, she becomes manticore

Performance installation sculpture

The relationship between artist and creator

How to have an enduring piece of work

Transgender narrative, deconstructing the body, the multiplicities of the queer body

Challenges horror

Harry Culy,

Gothic utopia

A zombie apocalypse

Not confined by a frame

Materiality of the photographs and as objects- they warp and shift over time

The relationship with other artists- a narrative?

The real and the unreal

Brad Logan Heappey

depiction of a graffiti work from 200 AD made from 3D printed miniature objects

Reference points and found objects

Whiplash of the internet, a modern horror- this here has informed the current direction of my work and how I want to push this narrative of the internet being an extension of the human body, and the ‘whiplash’ of experiences altering our perceptions of reality- mixing the body, the real and the internet

How we make art in dread- how I make art in response to pain, and how this can manifest in something positive- the anxieties of the modern horror, and the anxieties that surround the body- constantly having to think about the body in relation to others and pain

Horror and art- they both question our existence- how might my life be different without the dread of physical pain? Painting is a way to push this pain and anxiety into an object

Tia and Ming Ranginui, Minimum Wage

Old western town in Aotearoa that was built by an American billionaire

Musical western horror film in location in Whanganui

Strong narrative drive

Colonial gothic

Trust based relationships in curatorial aspects of show

Everything has been made for the show

Heaps of sound, smell and visual collaboration

The Brood has inspired me a lot in terms of my own art, and it has given me a better understanding of incorporating more ‘horror-like’ themes within my work- don’t be afraid to take a darker approach to my work

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Wednesday, 12th March

Crits Wednesday week 5- just 4th years

IPO due next week

Observations from painting:

I start the painting off with a sketch that follows along closely with the distorted image. Then I block in the base colour and let it dry before adding the detail. It depends on the painting if I draw the detail back in, or eyeball it with paint.

the more digitally distorted the digital image is, the colours become more pixilated and compressed- there is a digital ‘slush’ or ‘muddiness’ to the image. This results in some areas of the physical painting being muddy. Some areas are more defined with colour

Add another drawing in the corner of the painting?- the idea of mixing two images, changing their meaning

What could this image be in juxtaposition for the deer?

Let paint dry before adding new layers

Plan:

three paintings at the same time- have three paintings going at once

Spine- digitally altered spine/ digitally altered cells

Horror themes in contemporary painting- not explicitly gore or scary, conceptually thinking about the horrors and comforts of the mundane- how the internet has changed the meaning of the mundane? This is a topic to consider in my works

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Explore foundations more- not just canvas- make own canvas and explore use of wooden panel. I am interested in ideas of carving into wooden panel to implement text or features overlaid with paint

Slow Painting by Helen Westgeest- transform image through time and paint

Consider the way I source imagery, how do I source it?

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Gina Kiel Tidal Bodies at Twentysix Constable street

Tidal Bodies is Gina Kiel’s first solo exhibition. It is at twentysix in Newtown, from the 22nd of February to the 15th of March. Kiel’s work often incorporates elements of the body, through the form of murals. Upon entering the space at Twentysix, a large mural wraps around the walls. It is fluid in nature, mimicking the smaller works on display. Situated upon three plinths are smaller sculptural works, at first appearing as stacks of stones. On closer inspection, small, silver faces are welded onto the stones. To the right is a grid of smaller sketches. They overlay the mural. On the largest wall in the gallery space, five larger paintings are displayed, each framed. Compared to the smaller works, these are fully rendered, and exhibit use of colour. Each painting displays careful attention to detail, and have illusionary effect.

After reading the wall text and information sheets, this body of work is about cynical change and transformation. She is exploring the ongoing motion of life, and how experiences shape and reshape us.

The sketches on the left of the gallery are fully fleshed out in the rendered paintings.

Gina Kiel’s work exhibited are the constant motions of change and life, with the mural embodying a more intuitive approach to her practice. This mural helps seek guidance outside the standard display methods for an exhibition, and to me, was an impressive addition to the works and to Kiel’s previous mural works seen around Te whanganui-a-Tara. Her works focus on her personal experiences of motherhood, and the flow of s of nature; becoming whole again.

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Greene, Rachel. “WEB WORK: A HISTORY OF INTERNET ART.” Artforum, 1 May 2000, https://www.artforum.com/features/web-work-a-history-of-internet-art-2-162477/.

Rhizome.org- internet art archive

https://rhizome.org/

https://oxoxxxooo.com/  (jodi.org)

The term “net.art” is less a coinage than an accident, the result of a software glitch that occurred in December 1995, when Slovenian artist Vuk Cosic opened an anonymous email only to find it had been mangled in transmission. Amid a morass of alphanumeric gibberish, Cosic could make out just one legible term-”net.art”- which he began using to talk about online art and communications. The term was quickly enlisted to describe a variety of everyday activities. Net.art stood for communications and graphics, emails, texts and images, referring to and merging into one another; it was artist, enthusiast and technoculture critics trading ideas, sustaining one another's interests.

Net.art developed in a context crisis in Eastern Europe in the beginning of the 1990a after the end of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The artist involved in net.art experiments are associated with the idea of a “social responsibility” that would answer the idea of democracy as a modern capitalist myth. The internet, often promoted as the democratic tool par excellence, but largely participating in the rules of vested interest, is targeted by the net.artists who claimed that a “space where you can buy is space where you can steal, but also where you can distribute”. Net.artists focus on finding new ways of sharing public spaces.

By questioning structures such as navigation window and challenging their functionality, net.artists have shown that what is considered to be natural by most internet users is actually highly constructed, even controlled, by corporations. Company browsers like Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer display user-friendly structures to provide the user with a familiar environment; net.artists try to break that familiarity.

Artists Olia Lialina, in My Boyfriend Came Back From The War, or the duo Jodi, with their series of pop-up interventions and browser crashing applets, have engaged the materiality of navigation in their work. Their experiments have given birth to what could be called browser art.

In 1994, the Internet was still comparatively uncluttered. Populated largely by homepages flaunting hobbies and personal histories, advertising technology companies, or promoting online communities of all stripes, the Net was far removed from the asceticism of white-cube galleries or the high ironies of neo-Conceptualism. Indeed, the exhausted, commercially exploited art culture that had soared in the ’80s and crashed in the early ’90s was in recovery when the Internet began to take off. Very few people associated with art-world institutions were logged on at that time.

In 1994 and 1995, small cadres of leftist intellectuals, tech whizzes, subversives, and artists had begun congregating at online nodes like The Thing, Echo, Nettime, and The Well. Mailing lists and the BBS (bulletin board system) were more than structures for distribution and promotion: They were simultaneously content and community. Like Andy Warhol’s Factory, the people as well as the methods of production and distribution were all part of the project’s meaning.

The term “net.art” is also used as a synonym for net art or internet art and covers a much wider range of artistic practices. In this sense, net.art means art that uses the internet as a medium and that cannot be experienced in any other way. Typically, net.art has the internet and the specific socio-culture that it spawned as its subject matter but is not required.

Net.artists have build digital art communities through an active practice of web hosting and web art curating. Net.artists have defined themselves through an international and networked mode of communication, an interplay of exchanges, collaborative and cooperative work. They have large presence on several mailing lists, such as Rhizome. Net.artists such as Jodi.org developed a particular form of email art,, or spam mail art, through text reprocessing and ASCII art. Spam art was described as seemingly nonsensical texts generated by simple scripts, online forms or typed by hand.

Vuk Cosic

Vuk Cosic is a Slovenian contemporary artist associated with the net.art movement. He became deeply interested in ASCII code during a long period of research on low-tech aesthetics, the economy, ecology and archaeology of the media, on the intersections between text and computer code, on the use of spaces in information, its fluid nature and infinite converiability.

ASCII characters (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), is used to form images or videos in Cosic’s art practice. He created his own software to convert the pixels from still and moving images into ASCII, and he also experimented with audio and camera movement being transcribed through ASCII. Short sentences or paragraphs relevant to his work are often briefly summarised through few fragments of text in ASCII form.

Some of his most notable works include scenes from classic films converted into ASCII format. Cosic’s ASCII History of Moving Images in 1998 portrayed a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho (1960). Another depicts as secen from a pornographic movie called **Deep Throat, remade as Deep ASCII. Cosic had made a series of short animated sequences from various films and TV series going from Star Trek to King Kong, while in addition, constructing photographs of classical art.

Jodi is a collective of two artists, Joan Heemskerk Netherlands), and Dirk Paesmans (Belgium), created in 1994. They were some of the first artists to create Web art and later started to create software art and artistic computer game modification. Their most well-known art piece is their website wwwwwwwww.jodi.org, which is a landscape of intricate designs made in basic HTML.

Jodi (art collective)

In 1999 they began the practice of modifying old video games such as Wolfenstein 3D to create art mods like SOD. Their efforts were celebrated in the 1999 Webby Awards, where they took top prize in the category “net art”. Further video game modifications soon followed for Quake, Jet Set Willy, and the latest Max Payne 2 (2006), to create a new set of art games. Jodi’s approach to game modification is comparable in many ways to deconstructivism in architecture because they would disassemble the game to its basic parts, and reassemble it in ways that do not make intuitive sense. In one of their more well-known modifications of Quake places, the player inside a closed cube with swirling black-and-white patterns on each side. The pattern is the result of a glitch in the game engine discovered by the artists, presumably, through trial and error; it is generated live as the Quake engine tries, and fails, to visualize the interior of a cube with black-and-white checkered wallpaper.

Since 2002, Jodi have been in theri “screen grab” period, making video works by recording a computer monitor;s output while working, playing video games, or coding. The “screen grab” period began with the four-screen video installation My%Desktop (2002), which premiered at the Plugin Media Lab in Basel. The piece appeared to depict large, malfunctioning Mac OS 9 monitors that displayed cascading windows, error messages, and files endlessly replacing themselves. To make this video, Jodi pointed-and-clicked and dragged-and-dropped frantically to give an appearance of uncontrolled chaos.

https://www.electrohype.org/rom/jodi/backtobasic.html

This essay explains ideas around digital art and the relationship between computers and humans in relation to Jodi’s works

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'Bed Marrow' (2025), part of the exhibition 'The Brood' at The Dowse

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Iann An’s works are alive. They are made to change and shift over time, using materials such as bread dough, yeast, wax, animal hide and hair. Her installation at The Brood, ‘Bed Marrow’, explores themes of a nursery, transforming the familiar warmths of such a scene, to a landscape of decay, tenderness and mutation. Upon first seeing her Iann’s works, I was reminded of the movie The Substance (2024), mostly due to the formations, and the correlations to body horror. They have skin-like qualities to them, and the whips of hair and human touch brings an uncomfortable and uncanny feeling to the space.

Iann’s works help me question the materials I use in my works, and how can I push these materials in future projects. As a painter, I often find it difficult to deviate from the standard canvas and board, so I am interested in experimenting with my painting techniques amongst other materials. I am interested in creating sculptural works in the next semester that correlate to my current works, and works I’ve made in the past.

I also see similarities within how both our works explore ideas of distortion and mutation, but in different ways. I explore this through a digital and internet based lens, while Iann An approaches ideas of mutation through creating works that are alive, and meant to change over time. The meaning of the images I choose eventually change over time, and digital imagery mutates as it is shared and passed around.

Time is also a significant factor in this, and with time, our work changes, either quite literally, or conceptually.

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Monday, 24 March

Goals:

Complete painting

Start new painting

Create new reference images

Research

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Positionality: how understanding my positionality has shifted my work

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Positionality: how understanding my positionality has shifted my work

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In CPRM, I am understanding my positionality more in relation to my creative practice, and this has informed me of many considerations when it comes to my art. Positionality comes from experience, and the experiences I have inform my creative practice.

I also now understand the importance of introducing myself with the basics of my positionality to someone who is new to my practice, as it helps to assert my voice into the stream of creativity.

I understood my positionality going into this course, but I was able to express this notion I already had of myself through a creative lens. We often get caught up in our own states of being, as our lives become busier. Understanding positionality has expanded my views on my work, how my work operates in the context it is in, and how it is a representation of my experiences. This has helped shift the meaning of my works, basing my creative practice on an experience, and personal notion.

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Christine Tien Wang uses humour in her work to critique the capitalist structures that hold our society hostage. She uses puns, memes and internet imagery found online to convey personal struggles living under capitalism. She paints these memes to make the viewer feel the scale of the works, as we are so used to seeing digital imagery, and meme imagery, on a small device.

These works are humorous, but have an underlying tension of serious implications of capitalism.

My work, in a way, reflects these ideas, as I aim to create paintings that are used to slow down, and contemplate my own feelings. It is often hard to find the time to create, especially within the confines of strict capitalist preasures. But as my work does tiptoe around these ideas, it is not the main focus of my work, but capitalism ultimatley does have an affect in many parts of life. My work reacts to our current era, so indeed, capitalism does relate to my work.

Christine is reacting, and reflecting from personal experience and our current contemporary age. She has painted these memes in order to signify their absurdity within our culture.

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Little information is to be found on this artist, but KLMHEEJUN (username on social media), is an artist that uses imagery from video games, and paints them on textured canvas and materials. Whta drew me to his works are the texture he uses, I am intrigued as to how he achieves it.

I am unsure why the artist paints these specific characters, but those who know can instantly relate to the works ( I personally do not know who these characters are, but they are reminiscent of old game graphics from the early 2000s).

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Since the beginning of my IPO, I have altered some aspects of my works. I am now combining more personal experiences with the digital. I think this shift happened because of my group exhibition theme- art as a tool to express stories and experiences.

This wasn’t the sole reason as to why my IPO has shifted, but it makes the themes of my work expand from the digital to the more personal, as our lives become more intertwined.

Having only one week to really hone in on my ideas before formative is daunting, but I am hopeful to make at least two more paintings before critique. These paintings will be more resolved, either one more than the other.

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The drip down the wall- the pixels turn into wonky fluid

There is a flatness in the painting

“Meme Barbie”- returning to a digital realm, a viral life outside of the painting- more to this world, extending across multiple images and planes

Looks infectious, distorted- Annihilation creatures in this sense

Underpainting done well, works with the deer imagery

How far can you zoom into the pixels? How far can you zoom out?

Distortion of the images- found or made? Curious about the process of distorting the imagery of the deer- found image distorted by me in photoshop

The dots on the deer look chucked on

Place this deer in a landscape setting- how to position the subject, having it in an empty space suggests a digital realm. It is interesting that it doesn’t have a landscape

Grubby, gross, weird

Endless, the infinite

Alpha channels- cutting an image out in photoshop and removing the layers- alpha compositing

Photoshop lasso, feels like photoshop

Desire to see with a lime, neon green background

Go fully digital- tv, music video vibes

The dirty takes away from the digital aspects of the painting- an earthy quality

Move around with others- this refers to moving around with other distorted painted imagery

Bambi

Push ideas and have fun with playing around with ideas

Looks fun, funny, interesting context

Progress of deer on wall, can see scaled up large and painted on wall

Made into a rug

Shaped panel- pixels, shaped into the subject I am painting

Vinyl printing

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Onto, want to, 2024. Acrylic ink on gessoes wood panel 

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Working primarily image based, Jake Santos uses camera rolls, and online archives (forusm, open archives, social media) as a source to analysethe distance between subject and image through a non-contact medium in airbrushing.

His works often draw links to parts of western contemporary life which captures the presence of absence in a time wher econnection feels absent.

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Overall I am happy with the outcome of the critique, and am pleased the themes come across. Although I have altered my IPO and ideas since this painting, I think this feedback is still extremely relevant as it has helped push new and exciting aspects to my future paintings.

It was helpful to have perspectives outside of my own, and outside of the known context of the work. It inspired me to push my works further in terms of tools, and what I work with. I do want to be more intentional with how I apply my ideas into physical objects, and I struggle to find ways to do so.

Moving forward, I want to experiment with the 3D aspects of painting, and include materials such as moulding paste and plaster.

For the next works, I want to focus on altering my use of canvas, and paint a background for the digital imagery to stand against. Some aspects of the painting will be intentionally raised my the moulding paste. And these will be specific. I also hope to present the last works in a dark space as this is how my work best presents itself.

This digital imagery will be of some spine related, as this is a personal issue I struggle with. Having scoliosis, I have always been fascinated with the spine, and how mine works differently, and how it affects many aspects in my life. When I was younger, I would be searching up the symptoms, how to eliminate the pain etc, so I have a very personal connection to the spine both through the physical (my body, literally), and the digital (through constant awareness, and research, imagery).

The background imagery will be from my personal everyday, unnoticed experiences that often become obsolete. They are moments that I can take for granted, yet I become fixated on a singular aspect of that moment. For this next painting, this moment will be the condensation on the glass on my shower, and how the window illuminates this foggy, dreary start to my day. Each bead of condensation will be elevated my the moulding paste. The digital imagery will be overlaid, and elevated my the moulding paste as well.

To combine both the spine imagery and the condensation of the shower, is intentional, as this moment, in the morning, I am most aware of my pain my spine causes.

The shower elevates the pain in a way, and I can begin my day.

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Started with a background of burnt sienna

Overlaid with a titanium white after sketching the initial sketch. This sketch is based on a digitally distorted image I collaged previously.

I should have waited for the burnt sienna underpainting to dry longer before going over with the white, as the pigment mixed together and wanted more of a glow- will wait longer next time!

This test was conducted to see whether the next painting should have an underpainting before going in with detail

I don't think the underpainting with the burnt sienna will be necessary

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Plans for formative install and critique 

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Plans for formative install and critique 

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In a dark space?

With projection mapping? That would be ideal but if lighting is needed that will be suffice

Two paintings- one more resolved than the other

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Close-up of painting using modelling paste 

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Painting Observations: Tuesday 01/04/25 

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Painting Observations: Tuesday 01/04/25 

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Started new painting

The idea of this painting is to include the spine imagery over an personal image of water droplets on the shower

Used modelling paste on the areas marked with the outline of the spines. I initially sketched the spines out, but the detail was covered by the modelling paste. This will add texture to the painting, and it mimics the sculptures I have made in the past.

Tested whether to use the modelling paste for the drops of water in the background- interesting texture, but could be too much?

My next painting(s) will be of vertebrae from a collage I made last year

The texture could be too much, might remove slightly?

Apply varnish over top

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Not happy with this current stage

Getting used to painting over the thick texture is challanging, and is something I will get used to as the painting takes shape

Possibly practice drawing the spines as they are very complex forms. I am having a hard time translating them into a painted, textured form

I have realised that this painting is going to take more time than anticipated, could be a project that spans the whole semester?

Create a lighter background. Add in the water droplets

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Going into this critique I wasn’t confident in my works, and how they related to each other. Despite this, the feedback received was still valuable, and has helped push me into a direction I am feeling confident about. Although still unsure, this project is taking a turn in how I approach the subject matter. At the start of the semester I intended to stick to my subject matter similar to last year, something a bit more humorous and predictable. I became unexcited by the subject matter. Being given the idea to use MRI and medical scans has inspired a more bodily approach, and I am excited to return to this subject matter, yet still keeping it within the realms of the internet.

Above is a series of works I painted in high school, around the age 18. I was working on ideas around consciousness and the horrors of being perceived. These paintings, and the process of these works are how I want to approach my next series of works.

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Michael Borresmans has an innovative approach to painting that combines technical mastery with subject matter that defies straightforward interpretation. His charged artworks address universal themes that seem to resonate with a specifically contemporary complexity.

In relation to my work, Borresman’s works leave the subject matter deeply detailed with highlights of the subject matter. The subject matter is amplified by the use of negative space in the background.

https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/michael-borremans

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Painting Observations: Friday 04 / 04 / 25

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Painting Observations: Friday 04 / 04 / 25

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Applied a yellow wash to one of the spines to gather more colour in hopes for a glowy effect.

This looks rather jarring at first, but hopefully, as I layer more white over top, it will calm and only small hints of yellow will peak through

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Painting Observations: Sunday 06 / 04/ 25

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Painting Observations: Sunday 06 / 04/ 25

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Applied white over the yellow. I attempted to block in the shapes and detail of the spine imagery into the painting, but ultimately found this difficult due to the complexity of the images. Applied a small amount of yellow in the background to create a glow in the centre.

Applied ultramarine blue around the edges of the images. This created depth and an interesting shadow-like effect

I applied more modelling paste over the painted spines, being more intentional and particular in where I applied it (to mimic the shapes of the bones, intensifying the texture alongside this enhancement)

Although this painting is unfinished for my formative assessment, it still conveys the ideas I want to address, and has been a time to process my concerns towards the imagery I decide to include in my work, imagery that has strong emotional ties to my personal everyday life.

Having this work next to the deer is to show how I started, and where I will end up going for the rest of the semester, focusing more on my intentions behind the imagery I paint- they will be less humorous, and include ideas around the body, contemporary and mundane horrors and experience.

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I plan to look into the body, specifically the bones. I will use images from the internet, specifically from a website that is a free domain for accurate 3D renderings of body parts. This website is called Turbosquid by Shutterstock and contains a multitude of 3D renderings. I found this website last year but I think it will be useful in transforming these renderings into paintings.

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I am feeling a little lost on where to direct my focus. There are so many possibilities but I am worried about time, and focus. How many works do I want to create four exhibition? What will these works look like, and how will they relate to the works of others in my group? Although this is a focus for a seperate paper, it is relevant to the work I produce in studio. I am interested in exploring the ideas between how the process of painting ultimately is a form of both resistance, and comfort. It is a language I am developing along my experiences.

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Fbmp (facebook market place), cat fallen over, 2025. 

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Harri Newt is a UK based painter and sculpter. His works focus on documenting underappreciated objects and people, or challenging class based objects.

With Harri's works, I am drawn to how he approaches painting these found images and objects. They have a scientific and almost anotomical view to them.

I especially enjoy the dark backgrounds against the luminous object in Fbmp, cat fallen over (2025). The depth of shadow amplifies an ominous viewpoint, turning this very unassuming object into an uncanny image.

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I recently started to gather ideas for the title of my series of works, and after brainstorming a few ideas, I have landed on these bones glow in the dark. This is a reference to my spine, and how these bones are rooted in two worlds; the physical and digital.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_backbone

It also refers to the internet backbone, the principle data route that connects the global internet. It is interesting to me that this large part of the internet, and what connects everything together is named after a human trait. It makes sense though, as the spine does uplift life. The spine is integral to the body, as is the internet backbone.

When my spine is in pain, with each vertebrae inflicting pain, the internet becomes an extension of me. I find myself within realms online.

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The Internet backbone is the principal data routes between large, strategically interconnected computer networks and core routers of the Internet. These data routes are hosted by commercial, government, academic and other high-capacity network centers as well as the Internet exchange points and network access points, which exchange Internet traffic internationally. Internet service providers (ISPs) participate in Internet backbone traffic through privately negotiated interconnection agreements, primarily governed by the principle of settlement-free peering.

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Thursday, April 17

Today I gathered more materials for my painting series These bones glow in the dark. I have switched from the use of canvas to panel, as the wood allows the subject to become more of an object, rather than a painting. I have applied gesso to the board and sketched out the outline for my first painting of this series. The wooden panel is 400mm x 500mm.

I intend to use a colour palette that consists of a deep blue, and a soft light yellow/white that has a glow. There will be a slight green tint to it too.

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Three witnesses (after Max Ernst), 2023. Oil on canvas. 74 x 59.8 cm

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Razvan Boar is an artist from Romania. He creates mixed compositions of mystery and allegory, they fuse ideas of fantasy and the body, creating whimsical scenes. What draws me to his works, are the compositions. He places these mushroom-like figures overtop these delicate scenes. Hi us use of colour too, alludes to a fantasy world.

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This is the start if my painting after layering gesso over the panel and sanding.

I sketched the outline of the shape of the bone using pencil.

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Adding shadows into the painting, and applying a dark layer of paint in the background

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Beast of Prey (crying), 2023. ABS, UV resin, found stool and paint. Exhibited at Envy gallery, Wellington. 

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Brad Logan Heappey creates 3D Printed sculptures that draw from found objects and imagery, and broods upon ideas on cultural narratives of suffering, both past and present. His works contemplate, and are reacting to contemporary culture, and explores what has brought us to our current time?

I first saw Brad’s work at The Dowse, and was drawn to the ideas that surround his work.

He conjures up creatures of our current contemporary age, conceived through doom scrolling and our contemporary existence. We live in a world where an algorithm is serving us ideas, information and… almost anything at this point. This shapes the way humans now see the world, and not only engage with each other, but how we now interact with the internet. This has shifted over time, and due to theories like The Dead Internet theory, we are now making for an algorithm. We serve it. This ties heavily into ideas of our current contemporary age when it comes to consumption; how do we know what is human and what is not?

Door Drawing (I need a tragic future to invest in), 2024. Found door, UV resin, archival varnish, steel and paint.

Flower Study (double), 2020. Micro Crystalline wax on board

Door Drawing (worm paranoia), 2024. Found door, UV resin, archival varnish, steel and paint

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Taewon Ahn is an artist from Seoul, South Korea. He is a mixed-media trust who utilises airbrush techniques within his work, both paintings and sculptures.

Many of his works tend to depict either himself, or his cat, Hiro. Most of his works are about Hiro, and finds inspiration from stories and funny moments in everyday life and memes online.

“I like how those memes are numerous but Alamos odd, so I make memes out of my own cat”

“I try to make art that makes people chuckle. The light humour from memes are what I am trying to let the viewers find in my work”.

He is also interested in the irony of those images (memes), as they only show up in digital worlds, and it is possible to bring them into physical spaces. In a similar way, I am interested in bringing the digital into the physical, and finding relationships between how they are represented in each space. Painting is a labour of love.

He explores the overwhelming and unpredicatable aspects of the internet, and most of that comes through visual aspects, the images and memes. He states he is on a mission to blur the lines between 'virtual' and 'real'.

“As he collected memes fervently for his work, these once-enjoyable references began to induce visual fatigue rather than pleasure. Immersed in the rapid creation and consumption of digital images, Ppuri sensed a transformation within himself, as if the internal mechanism measuring the essence of images had malfunctioned”.

“Hypeart Visits: Ppuri’s Artistry in the Age of Internet Memes.” S, 5 Oct. 2023,

https://hypebeast.com/2023/10/hypeart-visits-ahn-tae-won-ppuri

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Untitled (logs), 2006. Oil, wax and collage on paper

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Toba Khedoori is an Australian-born artist, known for her highly detailed mixed-media paintings executed on large sheets of wax-coated paper. Characteristically, her works are composed of intricate details, modelling architectural renderings, drawn upon waxed paper or linen. Her works obtain repetition and contemplative compositions depicting façades, plants, grids, windows, and doorways, among other subjects that appear arrested in time and space- as though existing in a liminal state. Khedoori uses techniques such as repetition amongst negative space. This is very similar to how I have been exploring my current practice

https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/toba-khedoori

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This is the third instalment of the series my bones glow in the dark. I have used this edited image from a collage created over summer. This is another view of a spine vertebrae.

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Egg tempera painting using magenta and ultramarine blue

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Painting with egg tempera. Applied the colour and used water to wash away the paint to create shapes

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Owen Kosmala

Artist and writer currently based in Canada and is studying curatorship and art criticism.

Kosmala’s paintings are depictions of scenes, mostly containing animals. What drew me to their work is the use of colour, and the harsh outlines that surround the subjects.

https://cmagazine.com/contributors/owen-kosmala

Images sourced from website

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Owen Kosmala is a writer, artist, and curator born in Portland, United States, and based in Tkaronto/Toronto. He is passionate about DIY scenes, specifically their overlap and influence within North American fine art.

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2025

36’’ x 48’’

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2024

20’’ x 36’’

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2024

20’’ x 20’’

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2025

10’’ x 8’’

Unstretched

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2024

24’’ x 40’’

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Ash Godley

Ash Godley is an interdisciplinary artist based in Guelph, Ontario. Godley is primarily an oil painter using a unique command of light and shadow to depict the familiar from unfamiliar perspectives. There is a sense of colour that depicts dramatic lighting and distortions placed onto canvas, painting scenes that can be captured through photography, yet Godley paints them.

Many images from their paintings are scenes from their life, such as late night walks home from work, where the harsh street lights would obscure pathways and houses, giving rise to anxiety. These moments are mundane and repetitive, yet Godley has placed an important viewpoint of these moments through their paintings.

https://ashgodley.com/

Images sourced from instagram

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2024

Oil on canvas

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2024

Oil on canvas

24’’ x 30’’

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2024

Oil on canvas

24’’ x 30’’

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2023

Oil on canvas

24’’ x 30’’

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2024

Oil on canvas

24’’ x 30’’

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Sometimes We Fall and Sometimes We Ball 

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Sometimes We Fall and Sometimes We Ball 

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2024

Oil on panel

8’’ x 8’’ each

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At this point I am unsure what to add into this taped off section in the painting. I think I will paint the leaf as this is another representation of a spine in a way… the spine of the leaf

I also started applying a layer of untramarine blue over the black

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2024

Oil on canvas

33’’ x 42’’

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2024

Oil on panel

4’’ x 4’’

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2024

Oil and acrylic on canvas

40’’ x 80’’

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For my next paintings, I plan to finish the spine paintings, and create a larger one for my final. This large painting will have an abundance of images (yet to source)- relating to bones, also other images sourced online. This painting will have another layer of wooden panel overtop- this will be drilled onto the larger wooden panel- I might carve into this one, adding some extra detail and sand back the wood to leave some exposed- playing with texture and material

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Ideas:

create collages with canvas and plastic sheets?- an idea to explore with material more, drape plastic materials over?

Layering with canvas and multiple paintings at once

Dark space?

Next painting- distorted spine wrapping around canvas with layered images- these images would be random, found imagery

Painting Observations:

Blending titanium white around the edges within the deer

Outlining with burnt siennas and blue- adds to create a glow from within

Adding the spots on the deer and blending

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I continued the process of painting as previously, adding white, yellow and blue in certain areas to create a ‘glow’ effect. This is something too, that photoshop does when the photo is edited to look distorted, the colours become slightly more saturated in certain areas and we begin to notice the variety of colour within the image.

Unsure of what to do on the background, whether to leave it white, or colour it. Or even paint an image in the background?

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After completing the deer I was unsure of how to paint the background, whether to leave it white or not. I chose to create this murky, muddy background. This contrasts the clean, and pixelated deer that is solid in colour.

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I started this painting with a bright yellow undercoat. This is to amplify the saturation of the digital imagery I have chosen to paint. The images come from a collage I made in 2024, and I have a copy of it in my studio I tend to look at most days. The collage contains images of distorted apples and pears.

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After the yellow paint had dried, I added the sketch of the apples and coated the background in modelling paste. Inspired by artist KLMHEEJUN and their use of texture, I wanted to explore this more. I am unsure of the how the artist achieves the texture within their works, but I am interested in experimenting with this. I will explore other methods of applying texture to the canvas. This is my first attempt, and applied the past with a paintbrush, and my fingers. I let the paste dry before applying paint.

The painting itself was pretty simple, using a bright set of colours that included red, yellow and a mixed green.

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This is the second day of painting this piece. I have added a light layer of white paint in the background. The texture looks similar to those 'popcorn' ceilings that can be found in old homes. Or even the concrete walls outside my childhood home.

I used similar techniques as the previous deer painting to apply the colour, and included a harsh outline on each apple.

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I have decided this work is to be left as is, as I want to explore other avenues of digital imagery, mostly based aound the body and pain. I enjoy this painting, but I think it's intentions are to be used as a study, and to test ideas around texture.

I think in the future, I will use texture in a way that is incorporated in the images themselves, rather than in the background.

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Hand in for summative is Tuesday week 13

What art can do, what can be more ambitious

Be more ambitious with my installs

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Installation shot from group exhibition in isolation from other works

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I used this as a chance to establish play within installation. I created a more scattered layout of my works, inspired by the layouts of the internet.

Artist statement on current practice:

My current series my bones glow in the dark is an ongoing

investigation into the fears and comforts of everyday life,

entangled with both the physical and digital. It is too often

that the online spaces we stumble across, and the

monotonous aspects of life are casted to the void, never to be

retrieved again.

By painting imagery from the fleeting moments of the internet,

I seek to rescue them from obscurity. From imagery of spine

vertebrae to cute images of cats, the digital has challenged the

meaning of mundane.

Pain rests in my bones, so the digital becomes an extension of

my physical. It can often be kind, or terribly vicious, shaping the

the way I see and experience the world.

Traces of my being will be present in the digital, but for how long in the physical?

This series of works currently explores this contemporary experience, one that absorbs an algorithm.

Gathering imagery found online, I distort them to obscure their features, creating a new sensation when approached.

I use painting to solidify their existence; it is a physical reminder of their disturbing presence.

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Digital immortality

Digital preservation

Digital footprint

Online identity- your identity belongs on the internet beyond death, how long will it continue to be remembered, how will it be stored?

An extension to cultural relationships with death is the internet, and how this has shifted relationships with death. Many people who die as of recent have created, or interacted with digital content, leaving their online footprint to remain after death. our identities have become entangled with the internet, so what does this mean after death? Does our life extend on through the internet?

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Rae Klein is an American painter who's works range from whimsical themes, to despair. She explores the uneasy emotions that precede catasrophe, losing control.

Klein works with both oil paint and egg tempura, applying layers of translucent paint to bring a sense of light and glow to the paintings. She uses simple compositions to express vulnerability, and to build up feelings of powerlessness. Her painting techniques explore visible and invisible boundaries, vulnerable and physical. To gather inspiration, Klein browses Google images, develops photos from old cameras left in thrift stores, and observational walks.

I notice that when I am walking, I find and look out for objects, marks or intersting aspects in the landscape. But i never often take photos of these, as I like to recall and remember them, so if I walk past the same spot again, I am delighted by the same object again.

I think if I were to paint these objects, I would capture them in photograph, but for now, I let them be.

https://www.raeklein.com/paintings

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Laugh Track, 2024. Oil on canvas. They don't bite, 2023. Oil on canvas

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Lance Zuniga's paintings explore imagery, disrupting their natural state. He takes images out of context and places them amongst bright and heavy backgrounds.