Since 2012, Richard has been developing an Image Database that has catagoreis and criteria from which he has been genereating exhibitions. I am interested in how this database works and what the categories consist of.

Similar to my own practice, I am interested in internet based imagery, and am interested in the compositions of his works.

https://www.richardkilleen.com/

“The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates” (Steyerl). 

The poor image is one that is on the move, one that has been “caught in motion”. It is an exoskeleton, an anomaly. It is a piece of ironic art at best.

• “It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution” (Steyerl). 

Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, moving image artist, writer and innovator of the essay documentary. Her essay In Defence of the Poor Image, explores ideas around the hierarchies of media quality, critiquing the ideas around mainstream forms of art, and aims to view the ‘poor image’ as visual abstraction. Their materiality is temporality, as the poor image becomes a living artefact, shared, accessed and observed by many in a single moment. It transcends the notion of object materiality, and meets us with this conceptual artistic abstraction, one with a “dubious genealogy”. 

There is an entangled relationship between human and non-human entities. 

The poor image is constantly being reinterpreted, it is incomplete. 

• “The poor image is no longer about the real thing—the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation” (Steyerl). 

To paint imagery found online is a reaction to their fast-paced nature, and wishing to grasp them in hopes of solidifying them in existence. This doesn't end their vast and transforming genalogy, but it extends it into a new form, it is creating a 'loveletter' to them.

Steyerl. Hito, In Defense of the Poor Image - Journal #10. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.

Mills has done work in other mediums such as installation collages. Her works explore how “the notion of public decency is anachronistic”.

She finds her resources for her GIFs through the “dark net”, which includes 4chan, porn sites and various Russian domains. Many of her works portray vulgar imagery that relates to contemporary living, such as daily routines, stress and modern human behaviour. Her choice of imagery can also come from ore surface internet sites, such as Reddit and Google.

She is drawn to the idea of “free internet filth”- mostly sexual in nature. Mill’s works show intensity not just through the rapid pace of images, but also the strange system in which they move. Her works remind me of depictions of early 2000s websites, or someone’s collection of images and GIFs on Tumblr.

Process:

When creating a new piece of artwork, Mills begins her search sourcing images/videos on sites mentioned previously. When searching the content, her choices tend to be “GIFs that are un-arty, made from real footage and, for the most part, disconnected from mainstream culture”. Her favourite subjects tend to be outlandish. Mills then removes the subjects she has chosen from their surroundings/background, frame by frame. The cuts are rough and tend to leave edges of the original background attached, giving the images a “grainy, pulsating aura”. She then collages her gathered GIFs together using Adobe Flash Pro. When she puts the GIFs together, Mills aims to create a piece where the GIFs are moving independently, but somehow relate to one another.

Painter graduating from the New World School of The Arts in Miami, Florida in 2017. Thomas Blis paints scenes from daily life, placing significance on certain aspects, taking the time to render and apply detail to the world around him. I guess that these scenes and items Thomas paints are personal and often slightly humorous. They are real in what they depict, slightly nostalgic

https://thomasbils.com/

Images sourced from instagram

Oil on linen

30’’ x 29’’

From personal experience, I would find that my own relationship online has a similar effect. The mundane (accessing the internet, using the internet, using a device).

The internet is full of juxtapositions, and inflicts a sinister reality for its users. Again, we have become so synonymous with the internet, but the content that we come across can often be jarring, violent and disturbing when we least expect it. I think this plays heavily into the use of the internet from a young age, it traumatised me, and I felt a betrayal to have whiteness something so damaging. Remembering these moments from childhood online, it has now blurred into a dreamlike affair. Witnessing such horrors online in the comfort of my bedroom, surrounded by the most familiar environment, ultimately blurring the lines between reality and digital.

These feelings are still relevant to this day, often coming across imagery or videos that unsettle. I think this is the best way to describe Twin Peaks, it is unsettling despite the many mundane aspects of the show.

“Surviving Absurdity Through Rituals of the Mundane”

https://film-cred.com/david-lynch-theater-youtube-weather-report/

David Lynch was known for his dream-like and surreal storytelling, and he continued to play with the mundane on his YouTube channel DAVID LYNCH THEATRE.

This channel consists of “David Lynch’s Weather Report” and segments such as “What Is David Working on Today?” He reports on the weather, or updates his viewers on his most recent art and woodworking projects.

With this, he recognises the bliss that can come from habits as simple as checking the weather (something I do everyday) and creating art (also something I do MOST days). These rituals seem meaningless in the bustle of life, but creating time for these smaller aspects of life can develop daily consistencies to fortify themselves better against the absurdities of the unknown. He also encourages a positive engagement with the online world amongst the dread and overwhelming fears that are vastly spread across the internet.

Throughout his career, David Lynch’s artistic ways of telling stories are fundamentally connected to our navigation of living amongst absurdity. For example, one reading suggests that otherworldly or supernatural indications are the cause of Laura Palmer's death.

How to translate this feeling into digital media?

• a genre of horror that was rather popular during the pandemic was analog horror. This grasped the idea of the analog turning digital, and using analog-styles aesthetics to portray horror through digital mediums, and janky animation. The internet is full of horror, either intentional or not. These videos can be found on YouTube, and engage with the possibilities of creating horror for an audience online.

• For example, Kane Pixels is artist who uses software such as Blender to render full-scaled rooms and liminal spaces, and creating characters from existing models. His successful and very creepy YouTube animation, The Oldest View, is a three-part story of an abandoned mall, and in the mall, there is a large sculpture (based of a real mall and sculpture) that essentially haunts the abandoned mall. This is done through a ‘vlog’ style format, a video recording format that is synonymous with the internet, and has become a personal gateway to view others online.

• This style of video recording, combined with the abandoned mall, a place that SHOULD be full of people, with vibrant and harsh lighting, is now a landscape of abandoned ruin.

• This work successfully plays with the mundane, and caters to the new formatting of vlogging. This combined with the mall, a mundane aspect of consumerist life has created a disturbing piece of horror that relates to contemporary culture. The sculpture is out of place, an anomoly both to this fictional world and our own.

• This video has been relevant throughout my investigation into internet imagery over the span of this year. I Like to re-watch it often to be reminded of obscurity, what has and hasn't been discovered online.

• petittube.com- find YouTube videos which have less than 20 or so views. Videos that are incredibly unknown. There are no videos that have been catered towards an algorithm, just a bunch of randomised human experiences.

• Obscure media is one of the more tragic forms of obscurity. Obscure media takes time and effort, has dedication and thought behind it. Art that will go under appreciated, become unknown, and eventually into a void of nothing but another obscurity.

• The internet has turned ‘being unknown’ into something of a novelty. We live in a time where the internet has much power over us, essentially it is the largest record of human knowledge that has existed…ever.

• An interesting question to ask is; “What is not on the internet?” Really, everything is on the internet.

• The world is full of the unknown. Many of our lives are made up of insignificant events, events that pass by and are often ‘forgotten’. The routines we go through everyday often cause an imprint of a record of our existence.

• Images we see online become so mundane, apart of our routines and daily lives. Every image has been seen by at least one person, and that image has a digital existence, a digital footprint that reaches vastly unexpected areas of the internet.

• Creating art that no one has ever, or will, ever see. Not even the creator. Is this even possible?

• What is the most unknown thing? We can only approximate the most unknown thing, as to know the the unknown, is to know.

• People are the most unknown things? People became vessels of information, guiding us to understand the histories, routines and lives of humans. History will make us all unknown. However, the internet will put a slight damper on how quickly someone is forgotten.

• Forgotten things, lost media

• Image of the handprint cave

The idea that there is the ‘death of painting’- never through about this, painting is a big part of my life so the idea that it will die out is somewhat significant?

• ever growing presence of images and circulation of images

• Discouraged from engaging in critical reflection on the individual image

• Painting contrasts- stimulate contemplation on strategies in visual communication- painting forces to analyse imagery. I notice that the first few session of painting, I look back between the painting and the reference image. But after the third or fourth session working on the same painting, I no longer need the reference image as I have become so accustomed to it. I still have it near me, but I look to it less.

• Visual training, as consumers, aware of the tactics of the visual mediations on the everyday

• “The fleeting images of digital mass media seem to have fostered a longing for physical and more stable pictures, such as paintings”

• Desire slowness un the constant bustle- paintings influenced by the digital age and the contemporary everyday

• Also adapting to these contemporary characteristics and reacting to them

• Consider painting as a ‘time-based’ medium- many layers and steps that contribute to a ‘final’ outcome, what will continue of this painting in the future? Will its meanings change over time?

• Exhibition catalogue: Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age. “It is no more coincidence that the boom in contemporary painting coincides with the explosion of new digital technologies and media”

  https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2015/11/painting-2-0-expression-in-the-information-age-at-museum-brandhorst/

• The article above explains the Painting 2.0 expression. I have noticed that when I look at artists online and social media, many of them paint in relation to the digital age, and implement their own input to react to these digital characteristics.

• Painting allows for another interpretation of our current consumption of imagery, and can create connections with other people, such as viewers. They might find comfort, or relate to these paintings, as often times they can be both nostalgic and relatable. It is also a humorous and ironic way to portray the internet, as painting has deep historical ties, especially oil painting. Many artist references I look to implement these similar ideas within their own works.

Westgeest, Helen. Slow Painting : Contemplation and Critique in the Digital Age / Helen Westgeest. Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020. EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=0072c6c7-890d-3eef-95b7-852e989d65f4.

I started reading this book last semester and found it very helpful in understanding painting as a practice in a digital age. The book is available on Discover, but not in full (missing a few chapters)

I have included the highlighted areas of relevance from each chapter read so far:

Melissa Gronlund on Hito Steyerl- “Hito Steyerl has played an important role in critical theorisations of the internet and work responding to it. She repeatedly and consistently challenges the ideology around the internet and shows its embedded news in political and economic contexts. Her analysis hinges on exploration of the materiality of images. (Gronlund, 91)

Yasy Bachurina is an emerging artist working with ideas in abstract surrealism, blurring the lines between the visible and the invisible. Using acrylic, oil and mixed media, her intuitive appraoch connects personal experiences with universale emotions. By trusting in the unconscious, her work serves as a bridge between perception and feeling. She invites viewers to not only observe, but to also engage emotionally, turning personal symbols into a shared visual language. Her works offer a space to reflect, to discover one's self, and expand perception.

What catches my eye when it comes to Yasy Bachurina's works is her ability to create such a glow in her works. I am drawn to her delicate and etherial beings she creates, and seek to mimic her use of colour and technique.

Her works have been integral in pushing my techniques in painting.

These new perspectives, combined with her use of vibrant colours, helps the viewer question the familiar, and seek a new way of looking at the world around them. Atleast this is how Alejandra's work evokes me. I am drawn to not only these ideas behinf her works, but her ability to smoothly belnd the paint to create seamless works. They almost look digital, as she renders each painting with such precision.

https://alejandramoros.com/Other-artworks

• notes sent to me by Olivia

• Look at the meta schedule, information is on there

• Crits: Week 4 or 5 (with guest participants), Week 8 and Week ???

• IPO: slightly changed, (abstract, outline, background and methodology). This is due wk2 Friday

• Week 2: readings, what we have been reading

• 4 honours sessions

• Supervisors: wk1, wk4, wk7 etc- these meetings are every 3 weeks, 20 mins discussions

• 12 references, 3 texts, 4 artists, and 7 others- check with supervisor?

• Dissemination: (exhibition, publication, workshop etc)- some type of considered public display of (or about) your work

• Exposure: Friday, Nov 7th

Or a solo-exhibition?

Website?- how will I disseminate this website into the public?

• I think an exhibition accompanied by a website would be ideal considering my practice incorporates both elements from the virtual and real

• Unsure what dissemination could mean? What can and cannot be included

‘The world created by Yoshitomo Nara is a highly imaginative and deeply personal one. A world that is populated by wide-eyed figures who reach into our minds with their unwavering stares. These gazes are at times defiant and mischievous, or else melancholic and uncertain, but over the years, increasingly serene and meditative.

Nara’s creative process draws heavily from the etched memories of his childhood, his knowledge of music and literature, Japanese and European art history, and his empathetic and stimulating encounters with people and cultures through his travels in Japan and abroad. Spanning forty years of his career, this exhibition surveys his evolving formal approach, his recurring motifs and varied techniques.

On one level, the unique and iconic child-like figures, animals and hybrid beings of Nara’s paintings , drawings and sculptures are portraits of the artist himself. They are visual expressions of his innermost thoughts and emotions, conveying the strength of his humanistic outlook. They also provide vehicles to communicate his free-spirited attitude and love of rock and folk music, his enduring support for peace, and his deep interest in sharing ideas about home, community, the natural environment. Above all, perhaps, his art has created a parallel world for us to explore; one that uncannily echoes the ambiguities of our own inner lives’.

I have been a fan of his paintings and sculptures for a very long time, so this exhibition was extremely special for me, as I’m sure it was for many others.

Many Hungarian painters would study in Italy, so many of the earlier paintings depicted paintings of Italian scenery and people.

When observing these paintings in person, they have a complete different quality to how they are depicted through photographs. The artist’s would paint with minimal brushstrokes, they had simplicity despite carrying detail when looking from aback.

As I have only seen such paintings through photographs online, I remember feeling so overwhelmed with the artist

Last semester, I explored the very personal online experience of my own, delving into the realities of death, the internet, the mundane, and pain. The internet has and will be a place of safety, but with tensions rising, and as the internet inhabits many violent idealogies and a leap in the use of AI, the internet has now become an extension of worry, rather than an escape. But there are pockets online that hold hope for a celebration of the internet. Many paintes online have been gravitating towards creating to reflect the internet, as the wide accessibility of being online has been a recent and challanging aspect of this up-coming generation.

What I am leaving in the previous semester is the vulnerable aspect of my work, but I found it to be a very valuable project to explore in terms of understanding how everyone does have a very personal connection to online spaces, whether its is a more mundane experience or not.

Driving Creek Artist Residency, Coromandel. May 2025

• painting an pottery practice, trying to merge both into one practice.

• Paintings in spatial context (gallery, homes, companies etc…)

• Abstract, material, painting- simplicity directing audience to complex headings and ideas

• Nature of light, movement, temporal shifts- how does the work change as you spend time with it? (Physically)

Yellow Ochre Room, 2015 @ Christchurch Gallery

• square painted with the run off paint of the previous square (mixed/directed with medium)

• Space part of the work

• Architecture making the painting in space

3 cups, 2020-2024. Foraged clay, Island Bay

• physicality

• “Material, action, touch, movement, repetition, geometry, accumulation over time, slowness, colour and texture”

• “We move through life… perceiving” (exhibition with David Thomas, @ Two Rooms, 2025.

• “Conditions which the work was made within”

Barry Brickell

• Founded driving creek pottery and railway

• Planted native trees- repairing the land- land can’t be bought or sold (give back to country)

• Understanding him through his contributions to the art community as opposed to simply through the objects he makes.

• Opportunity to learn, teach and make pottery

• Had to work as well on the railway

• Employs 4 people to make clay work to sell, 4 to work. The railway (tourist) and 4 as conservationists.

Residency studio- collaborative space

• on site living space

• Week 4- wood firing in kiln (made lots of work to fill it)

• How forms and edges meet

• Phoenix kiln- 1300 degrees (melts glazes)

• Reduction firing- pull out oxide to surface

• Hikadashi- carbon coat, thermal shock

• Domestic pottery- for use

• “How did we use smart in our spaces/ on our screens as a way that nourishes our daily lives”

• Unpredictability in results of firing- variation in heat (location in kiln)

• Ash on clay can also leave unpredictable marks

• Foraging clay- tangata whenua- respect and Tikanga

• The house kitchen holds a collection of pottery vessels for use, such as dining

• Past visitors are encouraged to leave work for the next people who stay in the residency

• 2 mornings a week for 4 hours, you work at Driving Creek (building, cleaning etc) in exchange for free residency

• Barry applied for heritage listing

• Helen Mason: developed residency programme (potter, weaver)

• Davey Marshall: (Helen Mason project 2019), rolling tyre, @clay_wayz

• Ben Pyne ‘Basalt floor (low fire)’ - has a degree in sound design, then switched to ceramics. Makes tiles? New Lyn heritage building (bricks)- his home, renovating interior (exposing bricks)

• Significance of exhibition in space

• Isobel Thorn (ex ceramics teacher at Elam) ‘Karekare House’- ‘make something that you need’ elective course

• Worm farm (made at driving creek)

• Bisque clay, ground up

• Slip- clay mixed in water

• Wendalien Bakker ‘Sea of Grass, 2024

• Yasmin du Brau

- Driving Creek kaupapa- you leave something there (space full of art pieces)

• Two Rooms, Auckland (gallery)

• Vessel, Wellington (pottery shop) - Simon’s work is shown at these places

• Different context, different values

• Gallery wanted to sell Simon’s tea bowl for more than he sold his work in Vessel (didnt sell work at gallery, chose not to)

Describe focus, what are the key ideas you intend to explore through art making at the point?

Key Ideas: create works that revolve around the mundane, making personal objects somewhat significant by bringing importance to their being. I intend to do this through forms of painting, distorting the original objects beyond recognition. Painting these mundane objects result in their significance, and is a reaction to our current time.

Ideas around consumption, internet, mundane, horror and what it means to contribute to the pool of everything in contemporary society

Background (100-200)

Will this exploration build on your previous work? If so, briefly describe here. What new aspects do you intend to develop?

My series of works from the previous semester is now completed. I have strayed away from using the internet as my main focus, but ultimately, the internet will still have part in my works and creative practice. This is due to the internet having such prevalence within contemporary society, and is now an essential part of life; it is inescapable.

I intend to develop some ideas that I touched on in the previous semester, and would like to employ ideas from a wider source, not just my own experiences. I intend to develop ideas around the mundane, and ideas around symbolism that is currently prevalent not only now, but in the past, and in nature.

Objectives (200-300)

(How will I explore my focus). What do I intend to make (painting), and how (materials, processes). What knowledge and skills do I need to gain, investigations to undertake, and what presentation and dissemination strategies will I explore and at what point will I critically reflect on the progress?

I intend to begin this series of works through a personal investigative lens, and then broaden to a wider community. I will gather artefacts from others (with permission and consent) to use these objects and edit them, ultimately resulting in painting. I intend to create a large body of smaller paintings that will be displayed in a manner that will take up a whole wall. I also intend to incorporate, and bring back more sculptural elements to my work, and play with using plaster in my paintings. Last semester I became interested in ideas around installation, and how to extend the idea of installing paintings from a conventional lens. I hope to explore this even further, and

Timeline:

Week 1: AWAY- start investigations and readings, go to many exhibitions

Week 2: AWAY- Start drawing and pulling in resource images and artefacts. Start brainstorming ideas around dissemination. IPO due on Friday

Week 3: Workshop. Start painting and sculpting

Resources:

Do I need a studio space, and access to any particular equipment? What kind of materials will I be using and where and how I will get these. Identify any health and safety issues (how to deal with these issues)- annotated list

References:

Create a list of 6-12 references (at least 6 by the time of formative, 12 but summative). The 12 should include three key texts, four key artists, or artworks. The remaining three could be more texts, or artworks, or could be other kinds of artefacts, such as; film, music, fictional writing etc. MLA referencing.

• David Lynch (1946-2025) was one of the world's major art figures for many decades. His work extends beyond the boundaries of film to music and literature, but especially to the visual arts, which he was continouously involved with since his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia in the mid 1960s.

• It was the visual medium he found his first creative language, which he then further developed.

• The earlist pieces in the exhibition 'Up In Flames', which focuses on Lynch's works on paper - drawings, watercolours, lithnographs, woodcuts, photographs, and short experimental animations - also date from that time and offer us a comprehensive view of a substantial part of his artistic thinking.

• Works from his years in art school

• Disturbing imagery, atmospherically charged- reflects the depths of the human psyche, dreams and the subconscious

• His work is characterised by the creation of atmospherically charged and disturbing images that reflect the depths of the human psyche, dreams, and the subconscious. Lynch's artistic language is multi-layered, blending elements of symbolism, surrealism, and expressiveness with a sensitivity for anstract form and visual banality.

• The result is works that that invite interpretation but resist a clear-cut reading. This nebulousness is quite deliberate- Lynch rejects closed narrative and straight-forward meaning and instead relies on ambiguity, allowing for a deeper existential effect.

• For Lynch, art is a tool for entering inner landscapes, for materialising emotions, intuitions, and hidden traumas

• He casts doubt on the stability of ordinary reality and reveals its subliminal layers. Her explores the limits of the visible through material, structure, and medium. The unease that these images evoke comes not from direct shock but from a quiet disruption of the logic of the familiar- he plays with the mundane and disrupts a sense of 'normal' by shifting one thing to become/mean another

"In his work, David Lynch often combines everyday reality with a pulsating nightmare. An aesthetic banality and mystery creates tension betwee the familiar and unsettling. Ordinary environments, secluded houses, dreamy landscapes, abstracted scenes of silence and restlessness, and figures or fragments of cityscapes become vehicles of mystery. We see distorted bodies, empty interiors, and environments with an air of industrial decay".

https://www.delimbo.com/artists/94-osier-luther/

Damian Lopez Reina, better known by his artistic name Osier Luther, has developed a multidisciplinary career of great importance in mural painting, graffiti, ceramics, graphic design, sculpture and audio visuals.

He is a socially engaged artist who collaborates with young people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods, engaging with art and community.

His stylistic language is extraordinarily innovative, moving away from traditional figurative painting to create his own iconography. This is characterised by bright, harmonious colours and humanised figures that appear to have emerged from animation.

Osier Luther has a very distinct style that I have naturally gravitated towards, with bright colours and a smooth rendering style. Luther paints with oils, yet seems to capture a gradients so seamlessly, creating a world of vibrant fun.

Reflection:

The documentary itself was very inspirational, sad and engaging.

Notes:

• memories, experience, story

• “The Ballard of Sexual Dependency”

• Friends and her most valuable friendships

• Opioid crisis- prescribed for surgery, addiction developed

• Sackler family (powerful)

• P.A.I.N (prescription addiction intervention now)- a group of people who are passionate or have had close experiences with prescribed pain relief- meetings, plans

• They have intervention and protests at Sackler owned galleries and museums and institutions

• David Armstrong (photographer)

• Taking pictures (protection)

• “The other side”

• “Female Trouble”

• One goal of protesting the Sackler family is to have their name removed from the galleries and museums etc

• Protested with fake medication capsules and prescription slips

• The documentary switched between both the present work and activism Nan is involved with, and her past experiences and works. Much of this was devastating, and to hear so many stories from both her perspective and her friend’s perspectives was deeply saddening. Nam is extremely important in capturing her friends and relationships through photography, and pushing for activism around queer identities.

• Sex work, hired at a bar (Tin Pound)- a safe space for sex workers. This bar was controlled and ran by women

• Art world at this time did not value women artists (most of the 20th century)

• Autonomy, dependency

• Men tried to stop her from publishing her work, makes the sentiment behind her works all the more radical

• National portrait gallery declined 1 million dollars from Sackler family

• Curated an exhibition dealing with the topic of AIDs/HIV, centred around community

• This cause political uproar

• Louve takes down Sackler name

• Sackler name was removed from many galleries and museums around the world thanks to Nam’s interventions and activism.

She specialised in oil painting, with her work centred around the exploration of internet and incel culture.

Growing up alongside the popularisation of the internet and social media has affected the way she views the world. With a profound interest in the intricacies of relationships, the unsightly and the images lost in algorithms. Julia is not only responding but, critiquing the way technology shapes perception and human connections. Her work encourages viewers to question not just the art itself, but also the cultural and emotional frameworks it stems from.

Ruiter and I are both similar in the ways we approach our processes of the internet, using oil paint to explore and react to internet culture. Ruiter often paints familiar memes and characters found online, such as Trisha Paytas (a controversial YouTuber and social media star), and memes alluding to the grotesque and often times ‘cringey’ images from incel communities. This includes well-known images form this community, including a jar filled with sperm with a toy figure of Rainbow Dash from My Little Pony (I know it sounds crazy, but these incels are WILD).

The images Ruiter paints are familiar amongst ‘chronically online’ individuals, and have been shared through countless reinterpretations upon reinterpretations, that we finally become desensitised to the imagery. It just becomes another familiar meme.

We often brush past such nonsense online, as the internet has always, and will continue to be scattered with imagery that disturbs. Especially with communities such as Incels, a toxic environment that spread hate and misogyny onto all platforms, all we can do is make light of these online interactions. They will unfortunately, always be apart of the internet spaces, and so people turn their digital presence and footprints into memes.

Ruiter is successfully capturing this chaotic side of the internet with painting, and painting allows us to reflect on how truly bizarre the internet is. We are forced to be confronted with the strange connections that are made, as the internet and imagery online is often too fast-paced to take in.

In the vibrant town of Szentendre, I was lucky enough to vist the Margit Kovacs museum. To this day, she is a well-loved artist in Hungary and recieved many public commisions. The Communist regime at the time gave her a Distingushed artist award in 1959. She made sculptures around Hungarian identity, country folk, and included the relationship with her mother as an important part of her work.

She also touched on the symbolism of religion, with hints of an emotional side that set vulnerabiltiy around the death of her mother.

Although I do not work with ceramics, I found a connection to the work of Kovacs. Her relationship with her mother and her identity, intertwined with a larger Hungarian identity was interesting to see from the perspective of someone not from Hungary. I think the most significant part about viewing art from other areas of the world was seeking similarities amongst my own experiences and the artist's.

Hunagry has a history with communism, which ended in 1989. And many aspects of Hungarian life to this day are affected by this era. It was interesting to hear the perspectives of Hungarian life from friends and my partner's family, as we shared stories from Aotearoa in an exchange.

Along this exhibtion I plan to make a website that goes along with this exhibtion.

• Write proposal and check with supervisor?

• Uindo95 gallery- email proposal and ideas to the email address

• Contact Rice Pudding Gallery- email is ricepuddings91@gmail.com

• Blue door Studios (previously Windy Workshops)- contact through email, they are also accomodating to Massey students

• Start looking into website building if possible?

• Funding and sponsors- alcohol free sponsors

• In week 9, after formative assessment (22-28 sept)

I found this book at a second-hand shop and it is something that was meant to land in my hands. It is a bit outdated (can apply some of this thinking to the likes of AI, and how AI has become intertwined with human interaction and identity)

Introduction:

• We live in a world where the internet and the world wide web have, in the matter of only two decades, shifted from being at the forefront of a new frontier of communication technology, for most people being an incredibly unremarkable part of our cultureand daily life.

• Many hoped for an optimistic future around the internet. It has lead to pockets of alternative communities and even helped identites be comfortable, free from the prejudices of offline society.

• The internet has become something used by majority of the population in same way or another. It has become engrained in our society, welcomed with open arms. Our population has brought in the habits from the offline world, and prejudices which are endemic to soceity as a whole.

• A realisation: our culture has perhaps transformed the internet more than vice versa.

• The internet has now become a major part of work. leisure, social and political life, for most people in advanced economic nations. It is no longer a novelty, unique or has the potential to transform life, but its mundane nature and pervasiveness that gives the internet its significance.

• It has become emmeshed within the enduring structures of our society, so much so, that the online sphere is no longer a realm seperate from the offline 'real world', but fully intergrated into many aspects of our daily life- conversation, how we talk and communicate with one another, how we enjoy activities, how it shapes our behaviours, changes our moods and ultimatley has control over spending habits.

• The internet is a breeding ground of multiple algorithms that place us as experiments. As we engage with one another, the internet has control.

• The mass intergration of technology and the internet into our lives has been enhanced with the reliance of mobile phones. Our phones have become an extension of ourselves, it is in my hand all the time; when I'm cooking, when I am brushing my teeth, the few minutes before bed when I should be relaxing, I am scrolling on my phone. The internet has so much control over my life!!!!!!!

• Painting about this is a way to not only embrace this seemingly dystopian notion, but to also engage with myself and my identity, and how this identity painted through imagery, can connect to others. This reinforces a positive relationship with the internet, as I am able to communicate and relate with others over shared experiences.

• This is important as phones, while we live in an information age, and have the ability to contact people in an instant, I feel often alone. I am vieing the lives of others from the outside, and in turn, I feel like I am living my life spectating, rather than experiencing.

• Painting allows me to slow down, and recognise myself from a new perspective, and process any parts of my identity that have been shaped by internet imagery. I can engage with this imagery and question its significance to my life, either big or small.

Rhizome:

• Internet processes such as hypertext, networking and variability, the internet and many parts of ot, articulate the concept of the rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988).

• Before discovering this book, I took the likes of the rhizome to the internet a while back, and enjoy the notion of this, and is something that hasn't been though in isolation.

• Rhizome is a metaphor that Deleuze and Guattari use to describe a form of orginisation that is not based on hierarchical structure, butin a kind of horizontal network of relations. They contrast the botanical term rhizome with arboreal structures such as trees and their root systems, which they see as hierarchical, and associate with a particular way of thinking that involves tracing things back to centres or origins.

• "A rhizome as a subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether. Burrows are too, in all their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers... The rhizome includes the best and the worst: potato and couchgrass, or the weed" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 6-7)

The six principles in A Thousand Plateaus:

1. "The rhizome connects any point to any other point" The connections are random in relation to each other and any point can be connected to any other (THE PRINCIPLE OF CONNECTION)- there is a game where you use Wikipedia to connect one famous person to another through clicking links on the page. These links will always lead you to your desired destination (Queen Elizabeth II tends to be the bridge from the present to the past)

2. "The rhizome is reducible to neither the One nor multiple". In this respect it is neither a collection of individual things, nor one large thing. Instead, it is composed of dimensions and lines of connection (THE PRINCIPLE OF MULTIPLICITY) this also means that no point in the rhizome can be altered without altering the whole.

3. "The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots". In that sense, it does not reproduce, it transforms both itself and what it encounters (THE PRINCIPLE OF DECALOMANIA)

4. "The rhizome pertains to a map thta must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight". So in contrast to 'tracings' where one must follow a given path, a rhizome is akin to a map or a field in which one can enter at any point, and must construct their own path through (THE PRINCIPLE OF A CARTOGRAPHY)

5. "The rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system, without a General and without an organising memory or central automation". This suggests that rhizomes have nothing akin to a centre which is more important than other parts of the system (THE PRINCIPLE OF HETEROGENEITY)

6. "The rhizome is made only of lines". These lines can be severed or broken, but because it is acentred, such breakages do not impede its function but can instead create new lines for growth or transformation (THE PRINCIPLE OF ASIGNIFYING RUPTURE)

The principle of connection is fairly easy to establish, in the architecture of the internet is one in which connectivity reigns supreme, and the fact that one can connect to the internet from just about any point, and traverse it freely with one hyperlink to the next in seemingly random ways, suggests that the internet follows the principle of cartographies.

• The supposed network of chaotic structures of the internet means that there is no real centre that is fundementally important (heterogeneity), and the internet is able to sustain breakages without much effect on its function (asignifying rupture).

• In extension, the internet then lives on in the lives of us, we carry parts of its knowledge and use that to navigate daily life, we use it to make and create new things, new meaning. By painting the internet, I am extending this rhiuzome from one form of communication to another, as the physical form of the images have changed, the identity shaped around it has not. It has just expanded, entangled with conversation and reflection.

• The experience of the painting, and making the painting, then gives a new entry point to the rhizome. It establishes an identity that can be further investigated through connections.

Is AI a new entry point into the rhizome? is it a new aspect of the rhizome?

The Body and Information Technology

• Identity is not essential, that it is not something predetermined but something that is created within social contexts and through societal discourses (positionality).

• Contemporary societies have seen a rise in the degree of control over bodies not only from external sourses (chapter 5 mentions surveillance and cyber-crime), but also in the degree of control we exercise over our own bodies. Much of this chapter talks about the cyborg, and technology around plastic surgery and the biological advancements through technology.

• Use a mixture of frames for canvas stretching, use a variety of surfaces- a thick material

• Old canvases, remove the current canvas material and replace with another

• I still feel a push and pull situation around making art around the mundane and the internet, and how to incorporate the real and the digital.

• It still relates back to my distain for the internet, and the feelings of returning to a more grounded reality (one that involves nature, connection, community etc)

• The colours thus far are a lot more vibrant compared to the reference image. I think this is due to the fact that I am not using a pure ivory black paint, and instead ma using a mixture of blue pigments, and burnt umber, and a slight hint of lemon yellow.

• I intend to show a series of sketches for the up-coming guest critique as I am still unsure of how to approach my honours project, and how people who might not know my practice, might interpret the images.

• I am still currently focusing on bone imagery, as I intend to continue a part of this within future works, but the significance to them in future projects is less so. And at this moment, I am still trying to wrao my head around how I want to approach an investigation into digital imagery, as I am currently drawn to symbols of everyday life- this could be parts of my rituals and routines, such as taking my birth control, or brushing my teeth.

• I am conflicted at this stage in whether to include another image at the top of the painting, and whether that image should be related to the spine/body.

• I plan to create many paintings of varying size in the future of this project, and still unsure how to approach that; should I have one image on a canvas, or multiple? and will this workload be sufficient enough in the span of a few months?

• At this stage of this painting, I am calling it 'finished'. I am using this oppurtunity to help understand what is working, and how it can come across more 'internet-like'.

Oil on panel

8’’ x 8’’ each

Oil on canvas

33’’ x 42’’

Oil on panel

4’’ x 4’’

Oil and acrylic on canvas

40’’ x 80’’

Once I was older, and the internet became a domain for exploration, this book was left behind. I do not know here it is now, but it was the predecessor to the internet for me. This then extended into exploring more disturbing sides of the internet, seeking strange and unexplained mysteries through cheesy Top 10 videosn on YouTube.

Response:

Overall, the critique was helpful in regards of how to move forward- the flatness and absence on the rendered painting is more successful compared to the painterly-ness of the smaller painting. There was a mixed response on how to handle the paint in future works, as these were small initial studies. I am abandoning the bone series, but it was helpful to know what techniques and surfaces to use in the future.

Although I have received mixed responses to both the paintings. I think a mixture of implementing different techniques used will help define and achieve a ‘digital’ look.

This time, I plan to use the projection mapping to have my work in the dark, I will attempt it this time for sure!!!!

I also think the colour of the more distorted spine painting is far from the original so it is even harder to tell what it is.

I have an idea of what I want to make for my final painting(s), but unsure if the plan will be feasible.

• Overlook the broader consequences of phones and social media in general

• Social media- main source of news information, people trusting personalities over institutions

• Lack of trust in institutions

• iPhone, Apple- the App Store- SDKs (Software Development Kits- software so third parties could produce applications for the iPhone and could be sold)

• Free market model, competition began- a race to manipulate users to spend longer using apps

• Performative, social media was “gamified” (likes, retweets, shares etc)

• Phones are bad is a very repeated saying, but the blame is often put on the individual

• Work together, not detrimental to the individual, but as a collective

• Information- became our economy

• Free internet is a thing of the past

• Social media is often seen as a past-time activity to ‘waste time’- the opposite of work

• Someone is reaping the rewards of our time, our past-time

• As we use social media, we are building it, an unpaid labour of sorts.

• Labour-leisure hybrid- consider our truces to selves

• Goals in life, do they involve social media and big technology companies? Do they come to mind when thinking about personal goals? No- the goals of social media companies are not my own goals, neither yours.

• Tech companies (Google, Facebook, Apple etc) do not just sell devices, but also users

• Engineer users and minds

• Social media is like clouds in the ‘starlight’, block our ability to navigate our own spirits.

• Changes habits, ultimate destinations and morals- value likes, followers etc

• Searching for mundane pleasures

• Times for rest and reflection is replaced by instant gratification on social media and technology

• Polarisation- a major problem of our times- divisions about who we fundamentally are as a people- abandon the foundations

• A larger manifestation: our lost starlight, the grand narrative

• We lose track of our identities, and of what we share with one another

• How can we possibly see mutual values if we can’t even see our own?

• Connected to the world outside of our own

• No intention when navigating online

• decided to exhibit for four days, plus include the set up and pack down days

My practice is grounded in an ethic of honest and real process, where body, gesture, and concept act as sensitive filters of the world as image, driven by a constant search for the essential and the power of the minimal, where less is more.

This way of understanding art has allowed my practice to create projects such as No Lugar, and Ripanu, spaces that challenge traditional art structures and facilitate intersections between contemporary art, research, affective curatorial practice and collective action.

Grimorium Verum (serie), Analog photography, 2004- spiritual

Celeridad Luminica (cellphone photography, 2006-2014)

• Document the light of the city, close ups- another view of the city

• Reality of light

Focusing on the historical parts of Ecuador

Acumulacion de Capital Simbolico (2012)

• Currency

• Ekeko

• Symbolism, reflecting on the economic of Ecuador

Latinocentrista (2012)

• Mexican wrestler, Spider-Man, found object

• Latin-American culture

La Raspada (2012 - 2015)

• Weed resin, Invoice papers

• Apply the resin on the invoice papers

Requiem en Azul (2012 - 2016)

• acrylic, matchboxes, wall

Clorhidrato (2015)

• dried acrylic

• His works are criticising the capital, government

• related to human rights

Quivers Ser Mama (2016)

• photo performance

Protecting nature

medio Oriente (2016)

• sand and elephant sculpture- the elephant represents humans

Nam Nam (2017)

• capitalism has effects no matter the age, gender, class etc

Sapara (2017 - Present)

• series of projects that seek to contribute to the artistic and cultural regeneration of the Sapara people and the defence of their territory through contemporary art.

• The Sapara people are an ethnic group on danger of becoming extinct, there are less than 360 Sapara. their language is spoken by 1 elder people, over 80 years old, and their territory was illegally divided into oil blocks that threaten 100% of life found in this territory

No Lugar- Arte Contemporaneo (2010 - present)

• an independent project dedicated to promote the creation, research and dissemination of contemporary art through a program of exhibitions, residencies and workshops for emerging and mid career artists.

• Finding gallery spaces, no specific place to show properly

• Empty space, used as exhibition space

• More sustainable

• Since 2010, No Lugar has worked with over 450 artist, inaugurated 234 exhibitions, hosted 81 residencies, organised 23 workshops, and participated in international art fairs.

• many spaces

Ripanu (2019 - present)

• an artist residency program

• No walls because of the weather

• Exhibiting art without walls

• In the residencies, artists, researchers and curators have the opportunity to participate in an intensive process of research, creation, production and reflection, which at the end will be shown to the public

• Living archive of queer culture

• You are a stranger to your own species, this video is about how we will be forgotten, the ghosts that surround us and how they're getting closer

• Memoreis of yourself once you pass, trinkets, treasure, junk, emails, texts you sent

• Your child having facial features that are yours, being in the background of a stranger's photo- these are all traces that exist while you are alive, but continue long after you are gone

• Soular Corona- play on the astrological term 'solar corona'

• Nominal ghost- our names, representing us, whether we are here or not (first ghost)

• We die twice: once when we physically die, and some time later, when your name is spoken for the last time

• Oldest written name found, Kushim- champion of the second death

• Images of yourself (second ghost)- your likeness, figurative portrayal of self

• Gudea, the earliest person captured through their likeness. A sculpture of an ancient Sumarian ruler and 27 4,000 year old statues of him have been found in Southern Iraq.

• Earlier depictions of human forms before Gudea, are more generalised or abstract.

• All the found 27 sculptures are so realistic, and so similar from one another

• He is the first known illustrated person in our history

• Genetic ghost- genetic ghost won't stick around for too long, percentage of your DNA lessens as your children have children, and so on.

• Genetically left behind- more than 70% of your ancestors from 11 generations ago are not in you at all

• Becoming a fossil- a rare occurance, 1/10 of 15 of a species is ever luck enough to become fossilised.

• Ripple ghost- domino effect of all of your actions

• People a century from now could enjoy the shade from a tree you planted, the butterfly effect, an anonymous minute immortality, just by being born.

• You changed the universe, in a very small but real way, your mass affects the planets.

• The self- you are everything you take when you die. Secrets,the things you could have done, etc

• If your life was twice as long, would it have twice as much meaning? - the meaning of life, life is short, common phrases that cannot really be answered unanimously.

• If we were all immortal, would the meaning of life suddenly be ovbious?

• Meaning is seperate from the sheer participation we crave, we just want to continue to play the game, and there is more game than ever before.

• Digital ghosts- the internet, the world's largest haunted house

• Old music selling out for the firts time in history in 2015

• ON average, we spend 7 hours using our phones (haunted house) full of avatars and messages from the living and dead alike.

• People and ideas and art and the past have become not just accessuble but Excessible.

• We are on these ghost portals so much it has become pretty much the only way humans can find companionship anymore.

• Documentality, and why it is necessary to leave traces by Maurizio Ferraris. Ontology of traces

• To an extent, day-to-day life in a society happens as documentation. In a society of high documentality, nearly every transaction, click, step, every memory, everything said or done is vulnerable to recording or comes into the world already pre-remembered. Not as an ephemeral oral exchange, but as a highfidelity, timestamped cataloged artefact

• The future isn't what it used to be

• Complete documentality is far from here.

• We are a bunch of animals walking in and out of rooms

• A relationship entirely through text- these are not pieces of their relationship, they are not evidence of the whole story, they are the whole story. These messgaes aren't missing body language, the way they said it.

• Undying documents, filling up the ocean of documents

• ghosts to remember, to experience

• We are begininng to live as ghosts, our accounts are ghosts

• Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) by Neil Postman- the information action ratio

• This book predates the world wide web, but might as well have been written about it

• A modern question adapted from the book: How often does something you see on social media cause you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you otherwise would not have taken, or provide you with insight into some problem you are required to solve?

• When everyhting persists, irrelevance takes over. But the constant scroll of doom and pleasure and distraction isn't just irrelevant. It is a ghost that can pass right through you

• You can stare and watch for hours and not remember a single video you were served

• We don't do that beacuse it feels good, we do it because our minds want to be unsettled.

• A neveredning scoll of decontextualised news and horror and comedy etc, isn't some unholy modern abomination of nature. It is exactly the niche we evolved to thrive in

• What lays beyond is next, autoplay is on

• We are the universe ignoring itself, looking for something else

• Unsettledness: not knowing what is going to happen next, is exciting

• We are amusing ourselves to life, a longer, scarier life

Born in 1993, Zach is based out of Permanent Maintenance Studios in Brooklyn, NY. A lover of film and commercial photography, he is currently producing figurative airbrush work derived from appropriated media. He received a B.A. in Fine Arts from Skidmore College, though he would have preferred to have majored in poetry.

Indio will possibly be joining on opening night to present his work (music video)- this is possible, he might have plans with another venue that is more accomodating to present music and live performances.

• this chapter, Laing discusses the ‘ghosts’ of Basquiat’s paintings, the meanings and their symbolism becoming ghosts. They represent Basquiat, and apply an identity to his work, expanding not just his physical.

The Future of Loneliness (2015)

• Like the city itself, the promise of the internet is contact.

• It seems to offer an antidote to loneliness- enabling strangers to develop relationships along shared lines of interest, no matter how shy or isolated they might be in their own physical lives- two versions of an identity?

• Walls can be moved around- from looking at the space, the amount of my works displayed won’t cover the full room. If it is possible, combine with works from last semester, even works from last year? (Check if this is possible, as my practice has stayed similar in themes, just been expanding ideas over the year).

• Will receive floor plan so can plan out possible layouts before installing- saves time and resources.

• Can have the place open for as long as I want/ whenever I want (ideally from 11am - 6pm). Jaimie notes that there is more foot-traffic in the later hours of the day (3pm onwards).

• Email list of sponsors

• They provide supplies to hang works, but bring own nails in case.

• It was nice to see the space and visualise how I could exhibit my works, and how opening night could operate

• Advertising is done through the Blue Door Instagram page, I can design the poster and send it through, then will post. I can advertise physical posters around the campus and stores, restaurants, cafes etc etc

I will also ask a few stores (my workplace, Hell Pizza) to have my posters up if possible- seek out restaurants, cafes, Gordon Harris etc)

With the stickers, I plan to use a similar method from the previous group exhibition hosted earlier this year, but I will talk to Gabe about stickers.

Waitora beer

Hell Pizza Cuba street

Email about sponsors and what are avaliable

List of advertising places:

Around campus

In stores (ask permission)

• I have edited two versions to paint from, to have options.

• I have chosen to paint the top edit, as this one portrayed the hedgehogs in a manner that was more similar to the original image- I also find them to be cuter personally

I noticed that this has become a sort of ‘trend’, and decided that I wanted to paint the mouldy fruit in suit.

The mask face was found on the website listed above, and has a very disturbing and uncanny quality to it. There is a plastic, rubber texture to the face, clearly not made from real skin. But the eyes are so human-like and realistic, it throws the viewer off.

The website itself was a treasure trove of all the possible faces to paint in future works, as many of them were just as disturbing, if not more so. It also looked very outdated, a relic of the past. There was defiantly an eerie quality to using the website, as it felt like I stumbled across something I shouldn’t see.

Nevertheless, this is testament to how links and singular clicks can lead us to websites and pages that make us feel slightly disturbed, a mundane task of surfing the web becomes a memory that sticks with us.

Compared to the mouldy fruit, a source that has stuck with me in a different way (a source of inspiration), the realistic human rubber face mask is one that was too uncanny to pass…

I have sent this to my brother Eddie to use his editing skills to make this a little more cohesive. I am pleased with the overall layout and concept, it just needs a little bit more attention to it. I personally am feeling crunched for time so I am happy my brother is available to help out. Plus his editing skills are A LOT better than mine.

Using my installation at Disclosure as a guide, I marked on the wall where I wanted the paintings.

The website no longer exists as the domain expired in 2020, and the only way to view the website is through the way back machine.

I think this could be a really interesting investigation to partake in after completing my current project, and is still nostalgic, has built an identity for myself, and is internet-based.

I’ve always had a fascination and desire to connect more to the paranormal, and anything slightly creepy. I experienced many unnerving experiences through the internet, and still to this day. Although many of the internet disturbances are violent, gory and hateful. These are hard to ignore.

I do enjoy engaging with light hearted talks about the paranormal, spiritual encounters and possible alien sightings.

My past ‘creepy’ encounters online would be seen as ridiculous now, compared to the very real and unnerving encounters of today.

This is testament to the early life of surfing the web. There were dedicated spaces for children to go online, such as online video games and websites. But stumbling across websites such as Ghoststudy.com felt like I was doing something illegal, finding something I wasn’t supposed to.

Ada Bond is a London-based artist and has finished studying a BA in Fine Arts: painting at The Slade School of Fine Art.

An obsessive collector of moments, memories and images sourced from dark corners of both the internet and her mind, Bond creates intrinsically cryptic pieces designed to keep more secrets than they divulge. She commonly finds herself tracing unique patterns between images initially found impulsively, sparking threads that she spins into an all-consuming web.

Bond has a sense of whimsy within her paintings, and again, she is an artist that uses oil paints with a seamless technique, allowing the figures to glow. She uses animals and body parts to portray her cryptic ideas, blending them together until they become an anomaly of their own.

I was initially drawn to Bond’s paintings as they are delicate, yet increasingly more mischievous and off-beat.

She draws inspiration from medieval and Renaissance paintings, inherited stories, folklore and literature. Greig’s work explores the spaces between polarities, where tension and meaning take place.

• Drawing: “The biggest evolution in my practice came from taking a year off from painting to focus on my BA. With little time to paint, I removed the pressure and just drew. That made drawing a huge part of my practic; my works have since become more like drawing- painting hybrids”.

• Dualities: Life and death, sacred and profane, beauty and grotesque- exploring tensions

“I think the gaps between polarities, the tension between them, is where the best art comes from. It’s the juicy bit- trying to figure out how to reconciled the extremes inherent to being alive”.

• Rituals, materials, texts: “ I’m constantly returning to my big, fat coffee table books on Flemish Primitive painters like Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, and Northern Renaissance art in general. I also love to search for a random term and collect images like a magpie from archives like JSTOR and Public Domain Review. Most of my paintings are Frankensteined together from the various images and stories I’ve collected”.

Sophie Greig uses compositions and painting techniques inspired by Renaissance and medieval artists, capturing both the past and present, and stories that still continue to be told/experienced today. There is a note of feminine experience within Greig’s works, portraying mostly feminine figure and depictions of women throughout periods of of history. She also uses a variety of framing techniques that are included within the composition of the paintings, and hold significant shapes from historical and religious reference.

I appreciate the Greig bringing this style of painting into a more contemporary context, using colour and symbolism that pushes narrative and dualities.

Enter the Room connects the physical and digital worlds, transforming the gallery into an extended field to play that requires (inter)active participation. It becomes a dynamic “playground”, which changes according to how the visitor moves within it and what role they decide to play.

This exhibition was extremely interactive, with each room we entered being a whole new domain. Although it was difficult at times to understand the interactive elements due to language barriers, there was still a strong sense of the virtual and real. And it really felt like we were walking through a game landscape. There were elements of humour, and navigation on political themes such as capitalism, and the war on Ukraine.

The use of space was also interesting, as the gallery is set in an old building with historical architecture. And the contrast between the virtual and digital worlds spanning across this building was very jarring, yet effective. One of the rooms we entered was a dark brick walled dungeon, with the only object in the room being a lit up laptop. It felt ominous, as if we stumbled across this liminal space. It truly felt like wandering the domains of a video game, finding a rare Easter egg amongst the boss battles and NPC dialogue.

Enter the Room was an exhibition experience I’ve never had before, and was extremely insightful in terms of the art communities across the he world, and seeing what politics and daily experiences are both similar to my own, and dissimilar experiences that are unique to the people of Eastern Europe.

https://www.ghmp.cz/en/exhibitions/enter-the-room/

Wilkinson has successfully manipulated the paint to become an abstract form of dense colour.

Looking back on how I felt in the gallery space, there was warmth that emitted from the room.

Hynek Martinec draws together and extraordinary range of references to meditate upon the present state of human consciousness. Martinec, who has been living in London for over 17 years, responds in his new work to an accelerated and increasingly polarised world where art, technology, and social issues meet in unexpected and often paradoxical ways. In a time of fracturing societies marked by the rise of extremist ideologies and identity politics, as AI is beginning to have profound effects on the cultural landscape, Martinec traces a journey from the ‘cradle of civilisation’ in the Mediterranean to the present day to ask: where are we now? How did we get here?

While revisiting this philosophy, I stumbled across this website that is made by two artists from Ontario, Canada. https://happysleepy.com/art/drawing-thousand-plateaus/

The artist, Marc Ngui, has interpreted the first three chapters of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schzophrenia by Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari.

As I currently understand it, the rhizome connects any point to another point. There is a continuous strean of connections, decentralising any certain point.

The internet is a rhizome, as there are infinite connections and intertwined aspects that extend into the physical. Aspects of the internet have manifested into my own identity, and that identity extends into other areas of my life, such as my painting practice.

From observations, art and digital spaces are feeding each other.

She works from the images she screenshots from the internet and edits the according to her vision in the same ways that memes circulate but conveying the process on a canvas. This process situates her work within the cultural collective, as memes can serve as a lends for understanding current trends and shared states of mind.

What does the airbrush give you that the digital screen cannot?

“In a way, even though the airbrush is a traditional, physical tool and the way I use it is definitely shaped by digital aesthetics, I’m not just trying to paint my downloads folder, but more like conveying my vision through online images. I feel like the source inside me acts as a magnet that draws symbols that resonate. When piecing them together then through the process of painting is what brings out a certain sensitivity throughout. So the combination of the two feels like the closest thing to understanding myself, at least right now”.

“With information and imagery blurring together, everything feels both familiar and anonymous at the same time. For me, the airbrush mirrors that, taking into consideration that to use it, you have to spray from a distance, without a recognisable signature, opposed to painting with a brush, where you can see the brush stroke that every artist has unique to them. That kind of blurring between originality, and influence is very specific to this moment and it’s one of the reasons I feel compelled to document it through airbrushing, which as a tool has this anonymous essence that can be used to create this in-between space that feels very close to how digital images circulate or even how I look back on memories or dreams”.

How does painting memes change their meaning?

“…Painting is a way of processing. When images I use, memes and screenshots are from a fast paced digital space, then slowing the image down with the process of painting, it gives them emotional weight”.

Preserving the internet’s collective memory, or interested in distorting it?

“It’s out of my control how my paintings will stand the test of time, I’m just deconstructing today’s archetypes and reshaping its contact to feel relevant to me”.

Do you think painting can still be personal when the source material is so public and shared?

“ I’m less like the author of my own work and more a vessel. The ‘me’ in the art I make is really just an arrangement of everything I’ve let in, a piece of some collective visual consciousness. I absorb, and I let it all settle somewhere in my mind, hoping that when I get to the studio, it’ll come together in a way that feels personal— even though, in reality, there’s strictly nothing personal about it. The ‘me’ or ‘my creativity’ I’m pulling from is as much a construction.”

I wish to include as much detail as possible to the work.

Ignestam works with airbrush paint and handcrafted wooden frames, creating paintings inspired by old photographs, contemporary images and imagined scenes. His creative process moves between analog and digital approaches, resulting in works that reflect both modernity and a grounded tactile quality.

Ignestam’s approach to painting is very minimal; more is less. He uses similar subject matter, animals and imagery found often between digital and physical realms, but uses a delicate approach. Sometimes we have to look deep into the work to figure out what it is we are viewing, at least that’s how I view his work. He composes imagery together, mixing different styles of painting and textures to collate a collage together.

Recurring subjects in Wood’s paintings include commodities traditionally associated with femininity, commonplace objects and devices, car interiors, and ornate silverware, as well as close-ups or cropped images of clothing items. Portraits of women, notably the actress and comedian Joan Rivers, and feminine bodies also around in her paintings, drawing connections between notions of beauty and consumerism, and the fashionable and obsolete.

She creates uncanny close-ups, obscuring imagery beyond initial recognition.

Influenced by post ironic humour, shitposting, low-quality images and invasive media such as click bait advertisements, his work uses a mix of seemingly contextless and surreal content scraped from certain obscure corners of the internet such as, old 4chan threads bizarre religious AI generated facebook groups, click bait instagram reels and reductive stolen stock images.

This content is use in computer-based performances, paintings and digital mixed-media sculptures in order to explore our relationship with the internet due to its increasing commercialism, along with the rise of generative content.

Winder’s paintings have been a great source of gaining a clear understanding of my own work. Sometimes I feel like painting the internet is not enough, or it seems redundant. This is why I had trouble the start of semester with incorporating elements outside my digital identity.

Experiencing Winder’s works through online spaces has helped gained a confidence in my own work, and recognising my true desire to establish my online identity through paint

• City Gallery, worked at Te Papa

• The web of time, sites specific installation- hundreds of kilometres of black wool

• 15 year long career

• Painting to sculpture throughout the journey of art school, found the workshop, and Tim Larkin

• Discovered materials and how they operate

• Internship for ‘one day sculpture’

• Placement at Adam Art Gallery

• Steps to build a practical environment

• Masters, casual installer at Te Papa

• Allows for blocks of time to work on own practice

• Forklift licence

• Access into the national collection, Te Papa collection- behind the scenes access to collections

• Andy Warhol exhibition- balloons, maintenance of the balloons compared to working with taonga

• Casual installers at Adam art gallery and The Dowse

• Preparing specimens for display- organising and facilitating the installation of exhibitions

• Work with the wider Te Papa team

• 2017- reconfigure the Toi Poneke space

• Work closely with items- care and attention to maintain items and care for them

• Terracotta Warriors- preparitor on

• Working with objects that are over 2000 years old- originally on open display, conditions changed, had to have the warriors enclosed in a glass casing

• Touring exhibition, large crew, overseeing the objects and how they are installed

• Let Te Papa, felt that she had grown up, and pick up other challenges

• Joining City Gallery when there is no physical space is interesting- joining the revitalising of the gallery

• Planning on delivering the schedule- role is in the logistical realm, artist will come with their vision, Sam’s job to bring it to life

• Finale; Bouquet, 2019. Te Papa- most memorable project

• Included 6000 strands, appeared to be confetti, and to look frozen and seamless

• Worked closely with the spatial designer

• Installed a false floor, solid but easy to remove

• Needed to appear random, and seamless- mapped the coordinates of what type of strand was to be placed where

• Strands would get tangled easily

• City Gallery will reopen September 2026

• Had to find other spaces to put on exhibitions

• 2023, the Silver Rings

• Lost helium, had to refill helium often, closing the gallery

• This was during the world helium world shortage

• Various helium balloons found locally in Wellington, others better quality than others, resulting in helium loss

• Sent the balloons to recycle suppliers, endeavours to create a more sustainable institutions

• Training was on the job, problem solving, pick things up

• Always lending from artists and other institutions

• Work with the artists more at City Gallery, compared to Te Papa

• Casual installers- have less of a say to no say in the process, turn up and be told what to do

• Get that under your belt first

• Ease into working with artefacts, what point do you get more influence in the installation and curatorial process

• Separating own practice from other artists

Ruby is a Massey alumni (2022) residing in Poneke, currently has an exhibition (went to)

• "Love Towards" (2024) "experiencing the works is just as important to my work as my painting"

• Instagram is important for getting shows

• Rosa has a masters in fine arts in London. Poneke resident

• "Painting as witchcraft"

• "setting intentions is like casting a spell"

• "anthropomorphic" shapes following healing and poison herbs

• Bella Donna was taken by women due to dilating pupils. It is poison. Connections of witch trials with the rise of capitalism

• Gardening opening- side practice

• "Howling"- solo exhibition (2023-2024)- this included loose sketches stuck to the wall, messy, sometimes damaged.

• Blurring lines between the body and botany

• Facing burnout, travelled to Mexico and lived for a bit mainly observing

• Painting can metephorically express sexual themes, the organic, the orgasmic

• The secret life of plants, Georgie O'Keefe

• Studio centric workflow

• Printmaking residence at APS in Whangarei

• "that guilty feeling" outlined the importance of taking a break and pausing painting

• There is no such thing as an 'abstract' painting

• "bringing your personal life into the public" feminist saying

Abstract:

I will be investigating ideas around internet imagery through paint, solidifying their existence through experiences of time, and contemplation. My intentions are to reflect on internet imagery, their influence on identity, and the experiences of living amongst a multiplicity of algorithms.  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. I am interested in the idea that the internet is an extension of us, as much as we are an extension of it, and how it has manifested itself in creating a new perception on reality. 

When uploading an image online, what does it become? There is an intrinsic oddity about them, they carry a sort of anomaly presence. Essentially, they become another artefact of proof of our current existence as humans.  I intend to eternalise both the fleeting moments from life,  from my engagement online into the physical. I am reacting to our current contemporary age through painting, a medium that allows us to slow down, and foster the longing for stable imagery. I will gather imagery that comes from lived experience amongst the internet. 

Background: 

Majority of my works from the previous semester surrounded themes of internet imagery,  and my personal experiences with the internet, and the idea that it had become an extension of myself. I explored a series of works relating to my physical body, and how painting became a means of expressing my feelings towards myself. This series has done its duty, and I will move on to create paintings that include a wider part of my identity. 

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 was a an exploration on the artefact, and how this term is now translated into an internet based sense. 

It became more of a personal endeavour towards the end of the semester, and how these digital images had relations to personal experience through painting. 

I am interested to continue with this exploration, but with the addition translating the focus of the internet into a broader sense, and taking inspiration from imagery found through passing. I want to focus more on the relationship I have with the painting, and how this medium helps place meaning to lived experience. Not only this, but also painting as a means of reacting to our current time and place. 

I am interested in how many of these images, like the mundane aspects of our lives, 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 images from the internet, as they amalgamate into my identity. I also wish to note how others view their own identity through painting such imagery, suggesting the vastness of the internet, by associating certain imagery with their own meaning. Both internet usage, and personal lived experiences are a trace of human existence, as we begin to rely on technology more frequently. 

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 year, and placing them out of context from one another, creating a meaning that is indescribable. Yet the images I intend to paint will have significant and personal meaning to myself and my experiences online, rather than taking random imagery.

Objectives: 

I intend to make paintings that relate to personal experience, identity, and findings around the internet. Painting has become a medium to help process complexities related to identity, and also the complexities of contemporary life.  

The materials used will be one I am familiar with, as I have found what sticks and works for my painting techniques. I intend to use a variety of stretched canvas, and attempt to make my own stretched canvas. The process of each painting will be similar to one another, starting out by sourcing imagery found on various places online. The image will then be distorted in some manner to create another layer of absurdity. I will map out this image through a sketch, then apply layers of paint in relation to the digital image. I have developed a close relationship with my painting process, and have investigated what works in achieving a desired, digital outcome. 

With the paintings, I intend to mimic a high-resolution style that includes harsh outlines of the subjects. This is to not only to mimic the style created through the editing on photoshop, but also to create a personal style in relation to the images, rather than copying them exactly. During each painting session, I intend to write down notes and reflections to help better understand my process, and for any future references. This also engages with critical thinking and ideas, alongside working with my peers and taking part in critiques of my work. I am constantly reflecting  on my work, and intend to do so through out the process of this project. 

I will use oil painting as the medium. How I organise a composition to paint the subject is often random, and is a reflection of what I have negaged with online over the past year. 

To disseminate my work, I explored the idea of exhibition, and how this works for my practice. I intended to indorporate both a digital and physical experience to disseminate my work, but this ultimately ended up with only a physical exhibition showcasing my paintings. This was a chance to explore a playful way of installation, and how I could translate this into future projects. I also aim to note how others react to my paintings, how people from the public react to my work. 

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 moving 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 paintings that express certian aspects of my life; both internet and physical. This could be to do with the body, or with experiences. 

Timing:

Week 1: Supervision meeting            

Week 2: IPO due Friday, plan new paintings and gather ideas, visit exhibitions 

Week 3:  Start painting- sketches, plans and expressing ideas 

Week 4:  Guest Critiques, Supervision meeting 

- Install for guest critique on Monday

Week 5:  Guest Critiques- Critique this week

Week 6: 

Study Break: Paint, work on large painting and update workbook where needed 

- visit exhibitions 

Week 7:  Supervision meeting 

Week 8:  Formative Critiques  

- Have painting finished for the exhibition

Week 9:  EXHIBITION 22nd - 26th of September 

- Install on Monday morning, opening night 5:30pm

- Gallery sit all week until Friday, 26th 

- De-install on Saturday, 27th 

Week 10: Final IPO including 12 references due, Supervision meeting, Noho Marae (tbc)

- start new painting (final painting for final project for exposure) 

- Continue painting

Week 11: Critiques - Wednesday- plan to present in studio, as the painting is still in progress- finish large painting by end of this week 

Week 12: Paint

Week 13: Paint

Week 14: Paint 

Week 15: Final submission - Wednesday

My journey as an artist began in 2009 when I immigrated to the USA. In adapting to a new environment, I found refuge in the digital world, where social media and YouTube became my companions. The transcendence of digital platforms allowed me to access both my mother culture and American culture, shaping my identity on the omnipresent internet.

My art functions as an interface where cyberspace and physical reality interact. I critically engage with the influx of digital content, reshaping it into new forms. By challenging conventional perceptions of space and reality, I invite viewers to reconsider how we engage with the images and information that define our contemporary existence”

Kim has both connections to internet experiences between two cultures. This is something I haven’t considered much until now, but cultural impact of digital imagery is significant. Kim’s identity has been shaped by the two different experiences of digital presence.

As I only have the experience of the internet from a Western perspective, it is hard to grasp the parallel worlds. Although the internet is a cultural hub in which we can share experiences and imagery alike, there isn’t the lived experience and positionality integrated as a whole involved in cultural exchange.

Somethings online that have significant to another culture, might not be understood by another. Emojis could have different meanings in other areas of the world, and from a western perspective, we cannot assume the internet is the same experience- intersections.

Kim’s work is ethereal, and holds a chaotic quality that resembles the fast-paced nature of the internet through selected imagery. Like many of the artists I have researched this week, they all have a longing, in one way or another, to reconsider the imagery we consume, and take care to notice the significance of how these images shape identity.

• The current work in progress, the dolphin appears more pixelated compared to the other, overly distorted imagery

• They have their own reactions- this refers to both the digital imagery, and individuals who have reactions to the imagery, everyone creates their own meaning to the imagery presented, and can relate to what is being seen in some capacity or another

• Resisting the digital

• Capturing, clicking on something unfamiliar

• Technology- what we can control and what we can’t- painting allows us to have control over the image, with each brush stroke, and how the image is composited

• Creates conversations between people in real life- it is hard to tell whether interactions online are between humans no longer, so creating conversation around the imagery presented physically through paint, creates conversation and connection- relatability

• They become their own new thing through the painting, rather than their original digital state

• Others stated they could connect to own lived experiences, both online and offline- this statement was significant, because the imagery chosen is from my current lived experience through the internet age, what I have engaged with and how I am reacting to it. When I am painting, I am continuing to infiltrate my own understanding of reality through the internet, by watching and listening to YouTube videos explaining internet oddities found online. More often than not, I am drawn to morbid and dark corners of the internet, which in a way, is reflected in my paintings. Some things online need to stay online, and not recreated through paint.

• Noticing things the more you look at the work- noticing more details, more connections, more personal experiences

• Often I am depicting living things- I think this is due to the internet being a source of connecting different experiences of living creatures, memes of cats and other animals are often common, as animals are a universally connecting topic of conversation and interest.

• AI also includes imagery of ‘fucked up’ looking animals and turns living creatures (including humans) into distorted versions of the real thing.

• The topic of AI was strong within this critique, and with the very new release of Sora 2 AI, this is something that has become a stark reality amongst our feeds. Over the last few days since the release of Sora 2, I have had countless videos surfacing of AI videos almost indistinguishable from reality. This is not only disturbing to think about the future consequences of this technology, but also how fast this has advanced over the span of AI’s short yet dominant life span. The video of Will Smith eating spaghetti was brought up, and how my paintings have that look of the early era of AI. This is unintentional, but I also see the resemblance.

• AI and the soul- this was also brought up, but the topic of AI, and how humans feel the threat of AI because ‘it lacks soul’. I was questioned whether this was my intention, but I don’t think it is. I personally believe, and am enforcing the idea that I am reacting to the exhaustion of imagery and information spread rapidly online, and AI is apart of this notion. I personally don’t have any idea what a soul could be, whose to say my own ‘soul’ is more important than that of a computer. But I understand the conversation around AI and art. Art has always been a way for human expression and reactions- it has allowed humans to put feelings and emotions into place. And each period of art represents those emotions caught in time, with the tools provided.

• We could question how people in the era of the Renaissance would react to the sudden and intrusive enforcement of AI technology, what would their art look like then? AI has become a tool that is no longer a choice, and one day, like the assimilation of mobile phones and Google, I wonder if AI would become the same? Will we need to depend on it as we currently depend on phones?

• This is to say that yes, I am reacting to AI, as it has now become entangled with all other human-created content online. But I wouldn’t say that I am bringing back soul into digital imagery. Digital imagery already has a long lineage of history behind it, and I think AI stops and interrupts the rhizome of internet connection. There is no accidental nostalgic presence behind AI, it doesn’t necessarily capture the current state of human existence, yet it has been enforced into it. Inevitably in the future, AI and its current state as it stands, will represent this time period, and the imagery will ultimately be a representation of ‘something’- can it be a representation of humans? Or will it be a representation of something else?

• AI and not knowing what images are from human sources compared to AI generated

• Much of this is thoughts I have articulated after the critique, and processed how my work reads to an audience who was not deeply familiar with my practice and work. I think this was important to understand how a wider audience could react to my work, in hopes of seeking a grounds fro Exposure. This was also established in my solo exhibition, noting that my audience is niche, and resonates with a certain demographic- internet enthusiasts

The interent never used to be like that, until money became an incentive

Writing and Reflections

• I will say that this semester, and the year over all has drastically connected myself with my painting process, and I know it inside out as of now. I know how I work, and how the paint works, and know what techniques are used to achieve the look I desire. I have used this oppurtunity to take the dedicated time and care into this current painting I have not really been able to in previous works, as I wish to create a piece(s) that really show to improvement in my painting.

• Being at art school is a time in which I have discovered myself drastically, and when looking through the second year's impressive works, I remember how lost I felt in myself, and how insecure I was within my practice. Now, after almost finishing my degree, I am lucky enough to have the privilige in being able to figure myself out, and be confident in what I make and how I engage with my work and other works. Being at art school is a privilige, as it essentially a study that pushes identity, which is a threat to capitalism and the current structures around society. I have been thinking about this over the past month or so, and while I had doubts in my early years here, I can now say with confidence that my choice to study art was really important.

• Plan final weeks(!)- how to update workbook, what to update and when it should be done by.

• Plan final painting- photoshop together the final collage, have images ready but not yet edited

• While in studio today I had someone ask what my technique was, and how I approach my paintings. I took a while to answer, as while I have become more comfortable with my painting, I explained that the process is long, and I have come to find that I have spent a lot of time on details over the past couple months on this painting.

• The process usually follows with a rough base layer for the 'main' surface colour- this is a colour that I associate with the whole of the image.

• I then add in detail from darkest to lightest, and between each painting session, I wait for the layers to dry before applying more paint. This is so that the paint becomes more tacky, and doesn't blend as smoothly. I think having rough blending in some areas, and more smooth blending in others helps achieve the distorted, desired look.

• I then add the highlights and light areas last. This takes the longest for me, as I have to wait for the previous layer to completely dry so the white paint doesn't mix too much with the other pigments.

This film touches on the topics of surveillance (as well as race and segregation), and a very real threat of technology as a means of control.

Sora was thoughtful in a sense of bringing up this subject that is affecting both Japanese and Western countries. I cannot speak for what is happening in Japan in terms of technology and surveillance, but here in Aotearoa, there is an unease around AI, and the unknown behind it all. AI has become global at an exceptional pace, and the consequences of this have already shown to be changing ways humans engage with one another. I find it difficult now to trust what I am seeing online, who I am engaging with. This has always been an issue online, many people ‘troll’, hiding behind a screen. But what is more jarring, is not knowing if the internet is a space of human interactions, or seemingly dead ends. AI disrupts the rhizome of identities that coexist on online spaces.

Rylee’s work is extremely eye-catching and colourful, drawing on themes of the internet, and having their work based through online interactions. Although they are an illustration artist, they have a fun approach to the creatures included in their work. I was reminded through Rylee’s work to create fun (yet also weird) paintings, and have fun when making, it relives the stress from the pressures of life.

Through the use of Wolff palettes, layered textures, and ephemeral forms, Xu’s work becomes a space for contemplation-one that embraces transience and the shifting nature of memory.

Initially, I was drawn to the works of Xu due to the ‘foggyness’ of the rendering. There is a hint of nostalgic presence that can resonate with a universal audience. It engages with story, and the connections we make through imagery- we can connect through the visual language, through the depictions of light and windows, the depictions of the mundane.

Xu’s capturing of light is impressive, and I can see why I am drawn to his works- I love an internal glow to a painting. The use of colour too, imposes a digital quality to the imagery, as it feels compressed, having small flicks of colour around depictions of light.

I think there is a pull for emerging artists, and painters of this time to paint the mundane, to take time and patience to depict the fleeting scenes of the rushed and seemingly insignificant moments of life. Xu draws attention to these moments through painting, and does so successfully, he suggests memories that I’m unsure I experienced myself, but feel relatable.

His paintings remind me of coming home from a long road trip with my family, arriving back in Wellington and seeing the city lights, the tall buildings, and feeling so small.

The feeling of being small is something that I (and I’m sure many others) feel when in big cities, and also, when exploring the internet. Yet we can all relate to similar experiences online, the mundane aspects and the ones that leave fundamental scars on childhood explorations. I think we are connected to each other, a rhizome of us through experience. Connections can be formed through experiences that we share- memory, identity and cultural, we all have something to connect over. And painting, imagery and depicting one’s experiences through a form of expression can draw other’s in to share. From my last critique, I found that others could relate to the current bizarre experience of being online. Often we find ourselves scrolling online (social media, websites etc) when bored. We have replaced boredom with scrolling and clicking. Images pass by us, meaningless. When engaging with Xu’s work, and in comparison, by own, we draw back to memories and ‘scrolls’ from both real life and online.

Alex Colville was a Canadian artist drawing affinities to the American Precisionist's of the 1930’s than to photo-realism. His compositions on his abundance of sketches and studies, which are first brought into an abstract, geometric scheme before drawings are made from the live model and proportioned according to the planned format. Only then does the slow and patient process of painting begin. Layer upon layer of thinned paint is applied to a primed wooden panel, and the opaque surface finally sealed with transparent lacquer. This process can often take months.

Colville has devoted intensive study to European painting. According to him, it took him many years to digest the impressions gained during two days spent in the Louvre. Yet he has also been deeply impressed by the American Luminists, and not least by Hopper. Colville’s paintings are proof of the fact that a realism of content need have nothing in common with naturalism, that the serious realist does not unthinkingly reflect reality, but analyses it.

It is the analytical cast of mind, Colville is convinced, that permits him to discover “myths of mundanity” — on the banks of the river spree, by the seaside, in the circus, at sports events, on a boat or a highway, in a meadow or a swimming pool, in a telephone booth or a bedroom. Colville insists that the mystical aspect of everyday life is not reserved for Thor’s of the secular rank of a James Joyce, but that the contemporary painter can have access to is as well.

Colville’s silent images are static. Yet practically all of them tell a story, in a brief, concise plot that des not always have a resolution. Fundamental human situations are their both simple and complex themes: loneliness, isolation, parting, work, leisure, estrangement, love. The only subliminally dramatic, often melancholy l

In more recent years in the 21st century, people on Reddit and online in general, compare the works of Colville to old online game graphics. This coincides with the low-poly aesthetic that is relevant with game graphics, such as the Sims 2. Many online agree that his works have an ‘uncanny’ and ‘unnerving’ quality to them. His paintings look straight from a screenshot of these early 2000s video games, and that is what has drawn Colville’s work to the attention in online art spaces. It looks like he had a glimpse into the future and some the 3D rendering art and painted it. I think this is die to the limited, and flat use of light and shadow, there is seemingly, if not any dynamics that creates depth. This, combined with the slightly off-kilter compositions, there is the illusion we are peeking into a world unlike our own. The images are still, they intercept with imbalance and strangeness, despite the imagery depicting ‘regular’ human activities, or familiar animals.

Colville’s work has a hint of melancholy, reflecting the eras in which he painted in. The activities, the rituals and the scenery are things we still do to this day. But they feel ‘outdated’- there is a lack of technology depicted within his works. The mundane of the internet, the online realm is yet to arrive in Colville’s paintings, as he has captured mundane aspects of life in a period of time. We can still relate to the imagery, and now, it has a different meaning from when the artist originally painted. Because of technology and video games, Colville’s painting style has captured a new generation, giving a new meaning to his works, and comparing the visual aspects to nostalgic memories of being online. I can say, how works remind me of waking up on a Saturday morning to play the Sims 3 for hours on end. The often slightly dingy feeling this game gave me is similar to how I feel when I see Colville’s works. The Sims is a game that too, is mundane. You essentially play as a normal, regular person, living a normal and regular life. Yet the game had many uncanny moments, either due to purposeful Easter eggs, of unintentional glitches and clippings. Colville’s paintings have gained a new meaning, one that resonates with a contemporary internet age.

Ruby’s practice explores internet imagery through paint. She seeks to solidify their existence by creating an experience of contemplation and reflection. Her intentions are to react to the experience of living amongst a multiplicity of algorithms, algorithms that feed us fleeting imagery of ironic obscurity. In turn, these images have become entangled in Ruby's identity, becoming an extension of her, both online, and through her practice.

This painting is named I blame the internet! and is in reference to how my identity has been shaped, blaming the internet for my humour, my experiences, my consumption.

Draft:

Ruby’s practice explores internet imagery through paint, solidifying their existence through an experience of contemplation and reflection. Her intentions are to replicate and react to the experience of living amongst a multiplicity of algorithms, algorithms that feed us fleeting imagery of ironic obscurity. To paint imagery found online is a reaction to their fast-paced nature, and wishing to grasp them in hopes of solidifying their existence. In turn,  Ruby seeks to understand online identity, as it becomes more entangled with 

I added my email address and Instagram accounts as the links

• rubykemp2711@gmail.com

• rub3eek

• @untitledstreetview

This painting is an extension of me, a self-portrait of my abstracted self. And through this painting, I hope to engage with others, and converse over experience. 

Although the initial plan to have my painting in a dark space with projected light overlaid, sharing the Engine Room foyer with Indio is something I am glad to have taken part of. Our works always talk to each other, and this was an opportunity for us to celebrate the many projects we have invested time into together. 

The significance of my project thus far is to engage with the slow process of painting in an information age that constantly consumes imagery. By painting imagery from the fleeting moments of the internet, and ones that establish a personal identity, I seek to rescue them from obscurity. I am reacting to the uncertainties amongst human interactions online by establishing a relationship with painting in hopes of forming connections. 

And while I paint these images attaining my identity, I can reflect on myself, and how I engage with the world around me.

Sonny: “The line between reality and fictitious online spaces is becoming more in distinct daily. Many people who might struggle to feel seen in real-life social situations can find validation, connection, and sexual gratification through digital means. The work I create represents that unreal comfort, a depiction of what it is that makes us feel even slightly more seen. A fantastical representation of a speciality curated connection is significantly easier for many to digest. The anime girl on your computer can’t, and won’t tell you that you need a job, and knowing that can be comforting”.

Sonny as an artist, is comparative to my own, exploring themes around digital escapism and obsession of digital realms. She explores the digestible aspects of the internet, the more accessible socialisation and connection building.

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

This year, Taewon Ahn had a solo show at project native informant in London, England. His works are pulled from the lexicon of digital exoticism, transcience and spectacle, upended with emancipatory promises through analog processes. Growing up during the era of analog turning digital, his anomalous sculptures and paintings acts as a contemplation on yhe consumption of images.

As the birth and death of images are repeated infinitely online, Ahn seeks to depict how technology and late capitalism have been corporally absorbed and continually alter our perception of reality. His practice honours the nonsense, ruse and erroneous nature of existence. Resembling the filters we play with on our phones, he seamlessly texture-maps depictions of Hiro and other humerous figures, introducing friends and other animals.

"The young field of artificial intelligence (AI) Safety is still in the process of identifying its challenges and limitations. In this chapter, we formally describe one such impossibility result, namely unpredictability of AI. We prove that it is impossible to precisely and consistently predict what specific actions a smarter-than-human intelligent system will take to achieve its objectives, even if we know terminal goals of the system. In conclusion, impact of unpredictability on AI Safety is discussed".

• Still just applying more detail to everything on the canvas so far

• I often have to accomodate to the placement of the image to the canvas, and so the painted image holds different proportions compared to the edited digital image

• The initial sketch and start of the painting of the Rabbit-Owl was not captured, but it is painted in the top right corner of the canvas

• I have become fascinated with the colour that is in the distortion of the images. The mixtures of vibrant blues and purples in the white of the cat/penguins belly is something I wish to achieve through painting

• This would take the form of smaller versions of this one, and would sit on top of the canvas. This is just an idea that could be cool, or something to think more about in the future.

• Made from plaster, a bunch of different varnishes and printed images

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.T._(video_game)

It was directed and designed by Hideo Kojima in collaboration with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, and was released for free on the PlayStation 4.

Playable Teaser, or P.T. was an interactive teaser for the game, but was never fully released. This was in 2014. While I have not played the teaser myself, I developed an infatuation with watching others play the game on YouTube when I was younger. I was (and still to this day) a huge horror video game fan, but never had the courage to actually play them.

P.T. Is known to be one of the scariest video games to be released.

By watching these video games be played by others when I was younger, made me traumatised, but also engaged with the community. There is a large community for horror on many platforms, and I still like to visit the spookier sides of the internet.

This comes from a Silent Hill collage I made in April, 2024.

• sketching in the dolphin above

• 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, or bring in the more weird and disturbing parts of contemporary life. The Brood has been at the forefront of my mind since I first saw it.

Robbie Motion’s Exhibition ‘How I Remember It’ (22 May - 14 June 2025) at Page Gallery was one I was very excited to see. motion delves into the world of images and image-making. How, amid the perpetual flood of imagery we are presented with, across multiple platforms and purposes, does one certain meaning? And as a painter, how does the artist reconcile their place within I the production of images?

His paintings in this exhibition reflect the way images often become substitutes not only for memory but also increasingly act as stand-ins for lived experience; whereby the actual event or person or experience becomes secondary to the creation and dissemination of an image. In a gesture of playful artistic introspection, several works feature figures in front of what appears to be paintings of his own works hanging on walls, but ironically, nobody seems to be looking at the images behind them.

“My intention of the show is to explore the relationships between people and pictures; exploring the functions of images in present time while also considering how these functions and meaning will ultimately change as time moves forward. Painting feels especially appropriate for executing this idea as it has been used throughout history as a source to gain deeper insight into the mood and values of the past. The works within this exhibition seek to be conscious of this tradition and ultimately ask the question, ‘what will the images of our time say to future audiences? What will they assume of us?”

Motion uses a collage-like approach, creating contemplative spaces that exist alongside the corporeal, sometimes more or less explicitly, as in the inclusion of a window or an open door. Similarly, Motion has a way of collapsing time in his work; classicism, myth, modernism, and contemporary culture are muddied together in an oddly familiar and fluid way, like the faint memory of a half-forgotten dream.

“My soft focus photorealistic airbrush technique dematerialises the brushstroke, so the painting looks less like a painting and more like a digital print. This process also keeps intact the commonly perceived values that painting has over digital media. These values include, but are not limited to: pigment quality, the acceptance and respect that painting is given in art, the rarefied object, the reverence of labour , etc. Combining this percieved glory of painting with internet trash easy grab content, a contemporary solution to the historical baggage of painting is provided and the transubstantiation of appropriated imagery occurs”.

This final painting, I blame the internet!, is paying homage to the identity I have made over the past few years, and directing this identity onto one canvas. I wish to have included more subject matter into the final work, but I am overall pleased how the painting turned out.

It is expressing my own identity, and I have had the privilege of being able to explore this identity through the fine arts course.

Reidmüller’s process is complex, as he generates collages of his compositions, then through a slow painting process, he essentially “reshapes and reproduces” what has already been made by the artificial intelligence. This form of duplication results an interesting way of reversing the familiar use of turning the unique into digital. Riedmüller reduces the possible infinite copies of a piece, into one singular artwork.

Riedmüller’s style and themes are both very interesting, commentating on the digital aesthetic, and the replicability of artistic skill. And with his other works, they all have a similar aesthetic in mimicking the digital art scene but through traditional mediums of painting. 

Simialr to Gao Hang, Reidmueller's works are ones I often go back to, especially when I am feeling lost in my art. It reminds me of where I started in this journey in developing my art, to where I am now.

https://www.instagram.com/paul_riedmueller/  

Greene, Rachel. Internet Art. Thames & Hudson, 2004. search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=cat09011a&AN=mul.oai.edge.massey.folio.ebsco.com.fs00001086.c1e0bf74.19dd.5a8e.a580.3fe6fd89e3d0&site=eds-live&scope=site. 

Betti Marenko: Deleuze and Design: Digital Materiality, Morphogenesis and the intelligence of the Technodigital object (2015).

What is an event?

“Events are produced in a chaos, in a chaotic multiplicity, but only under the condition that a sort of screen intervenes” (Deleuze, 76). 

With multiplicities (Many), the chaos ensures to become singular with the intensities of forces. Thus, “in a sense, technodigital objects are blurry entities, conflating hardware and software” (Marenko, 122). 

Marenko, a trans-disciplinary theorist, academic and educator integrates the ideas of Deleuzian theories with ones of technodigital objectiles, and questions the boundaries of digital materiality with objects. 

She investigates the assemblages, entities of open-ended ‘technodigital objects’, a new assortment of multiple material intelligences, while not excluding human, but rather combining the ideas of human and digital. 

Throughout this chapter, Marenko explores the key concepts around Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s collaborative works. Such ideas are “deployed to unpack the argument of the materiality of the technodigital object: the transition from object to objectile; a morphogenetic account of matter; and the implications of a radical material vitalism”

As the objects mutate, the process of creative thinking and making must also be rethought, as, “Deleuze and Guattari’s thought that matter is to be apprehended via intuitive and inquisitive forms of knowledge”. The object, through the technodigital space has become “open-ended”,  incomplete. With this, we are forced to “question the dichotomy between the tangible and intangible”. The forces, densities and intensities are essential in this way of thinking. This self organising, spontaneously shifting matter of non-organic intensities has a philosophical relation to the ideas of Baruch Spinoza- one substance, of which everything exists, manifesting actively through the world. 

There are actions that are continuously being produced and reproduced, in accordance to the non-hierarchical dynamic between substances. To view this context within Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective, we have to critique the Anthropocene- the current geological epoch, one that centres humans above all. This places a hierarchy above other material substances. Deleuze and Guattari’s materialism “postulates that all things are formed through differentiation and individuation of the same substance, and that matter vibrates with the potential of its creative evolution and innovation”. There are a myriad of multiples, a multiplicity of interactions causing reactions; - a “silent dance of forces”. 

“Infinite permutations are seen through a relational world-view where the human and the non-human, the sub-personal and the molecular ceaselessly combine and recombine through a myriad of rhizomes, assemblages and machines”. 

We can ultimately take this into account for the idea that many creative forces on the internet are inherently reproductions of reproductions, and will continue to do so indefinitely. But due to Anthropocentric central thinking, there is a lack of appreciation to these forces that ultimately bind us to these creative entities, thus creating a hierarchy that absorbs the ideas of the rhizomatic system Deleuze and Guattari argue towards. 

Deleuze and Guattari’s radical materialism can articulate the relationship we have with the living internet artefact. It does this by providing an “experimental, intuitive, material understanding of our interaction with, and experience of , digital objects, and by suggesting an ecology of the human and the non-human based on the crisscrossing and entanglement of silicon and carbon, and all their possible, wondrous becomings (Marenko, 131). Marenko, in this chapter, has argued, and offers a new way of understanding how objects come into being. This perspective allows us to understand “current technodigital objects”, and poses the idea of evolutionary, and mutually coexisting material intelligences. 

Technodigital objects, or the digital artefact are never inanimate. Humans simultaneously experience the same learnings as the non-human, the non-human ultimately being one with the human.

Marenko, Betti. Deleuze and Design: Digital Materiality, Morphogenesis and the intelligence of the Technodigital object. Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 2015.

a crucial role in this disruption, as it not only changes the way images are created but also reshapes our relationship with visual content. This process initiates a chain reaction, causing entwined social and cultural practices to break apart, adapt to, and be influenced by modern technologies (Mitchell, 1992). In contrast to symbolic references and binary universality values, the era of inorganic images challenges traditional models of visual representation and communication by emphasizing the interconnection of networks that generate images. The questions that this paper aims to clarify are:

- What are the similarities between AI-generated images and the concept of

rhizomes?

- How can the philosophical concept of the rhizome improve our understanding of AI-generated images?

"The massive production and distribution of digital images in contemporary times have prompted us to rethink the rules of

image aesthetics, ontology, and epistemology. It is important to understand the significance of inorganic imagery in shaping and propelling the modern world,

characterized by a dichotomy between the virtual and the tangible. In an era saturated with images that are increasingly supplanting written texts, the absence of

critical analysis of visual content poses a significant challenge, given the misconception of images as inherently objective (Flusser, 1983)".

"By drawing parallels with modern visual representations and

AI-generated imagery, it can be inferred that no matter how much we comprehend, there always remains an expanse of the unknown".

A closer examination reveals significant parallels and connections between the

symbolism of AI-generated images as well as of the rhizome. Each entity and

representation challenges established norms by embracing difference and

adaptability. AI functions as a decentralized entity in which fluid interactions

among its various parts produce emergent results, similar to the rhizome. The nonlinear

role played by each pixel or component in the overall composition of AIgenerated

imagery distorts traditional distinctions between the creator and the

medium. In the same way, the rhizome defies the concept of centralized authority

by placing greater emphasis on decentralized intelligence and collective agency

within interconnected systems.

AI-generated images without question contain both symbolic and representational

qualities. Nevertheless, restricting the investigation of contemporary imagery to

these characteristics neglects the complex multiplicity of processes that function

inside as well as outside the image, thus preserving the dominance of contexts that

are essential to its conceptual foundations. Despite image relevance in shaping our

technological and cultural environment, they are often subjected to random use in

modern society. Additionally, it is usual for scientific evaluations of images to

prioritize aesthetic characteristics at the expense of the various visual details

researched in different areas of study.

As AI-generated images are

increasingly becoming more prevalent, and in doing so, they are reshaping our

relationship to visual content.

I think the introduction of AI generated content is so jarring and unpredictable to humans and many creative forces, is because these AI images are not encapsulated with human connection. They do not extend into the physical as significantly, as there is knowledge on how AI imagery is generated. We are, in a way, forcing an intersection between ourselves and AI content.

We have gone through many changes when faced with AI, at first it was a cool novelty that created disturbing image sfrom nothing. Then it started becoming a threat, a danger that seemed to rampant to control. Now, we have merely embraced it. It is now mundane, the norm. We see AI everyday now, even if you try and resist.

The significance of AI 'taking over' is often related to art and creativity. The internet, and in exstention, the physical world, uses symbolism and art to communicate and connect. And now, it is hard to trust whether what we are engaging with online is actually made by another human. So there is a natural distrust with this new technology, on top its environmental impacts and harmful nature.

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

• Catching big fish (in relation to David Lynch and one of his quotes that suggests that ideas are like fish “Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”
  ― David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity)

• Rotten to the core

• Networks

• The dilemma

• A fragile future

• Caught in the web

• Unidentified source

• Identified source

• Cookie cutter

• Dread and desire

• Help! I fel in love with the web!

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

36’’ x 48’’

20’’ x 36’’

20’’ x 20’’

10’’ x 8’’

Unstretched

24’’ x 40’’

• This has been adding a heap of stress to an already stressful situation, so I am worried whether this current plan, to exhibit at Blue Door Studios, will no go forward.

• Jenny suggested I contact Jhana Millers and Urban Dream Brokage incase I do not hear from the current place by today

• Contact Uindo95, research other places for lease around the area

• One Pandemonium (meat)

• One Lust (meat)

• One gluten free and vegetarian Pandemonium

• One vegan and gluten free option?

• One vegetarian option, Pride

I started with the fish today and blocked in colour based on the reference image.

• At this stage it is coming together

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

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.

Their works are not explicitly about internet themes, but they have a vacent, void like approach that is reminiscent of internet imagery that is under the popular term, liminal spaces. These works are off kilter, and have a strange and disturbing effect. They remind me of scrolling on Reddit and stumbling across a ghost image posted by a user, asking questions on how to get rid of the ghost, or to have confirmation from others that they have had similar experiences too. The internet is comforting like that, you can share experiences and feel some relief in knowing that your experiences are often shared.

https://ashgodley.com/

Images sourced from instagram

Oil on canvas

Oil on canvas

24’’ x 30’’

Oil on canvas

24’’ x 30’’

Oil on canvas

24’’ x 30’’

For this semesters experimentation, I will need access to a studio space, particularly one with a large wall for larger works/or body of work. I will also need access to a computer or the computer lab in block 2 for tools such as photoshop and the printers. In my studio space, I will have all my painting supplies set up including a desk easel. This will be used for smaller works as I can sit down, while I prefer to stand for larger works, so I will work with the canvas on the wall.

- My personal and wider collection of images/physical artefacts.

- Access to Adobe Photoshop- I have this downloaded on my PC, and will be learning how to use photoshop along the process of creating.

- Canvas, wooden panel, glass, etc- support to paint on, still unsure of what material to include, so I will experiment

- Printer

- Oil colours and acrylic paint- experiment with methods of painting. Acrylic used for underpainting as it takes less time to dry.

- Paint brushes- gathered from art supply stores (Gordon Harris)

- Archival solvent and linseed oil- dispose with painting rags, and paint with the windows open AT ALL TIMES!!!!

- Painting rags

- Jars for archival solvent

- Glass mixing pallet

Her exhibition in Christchurch City Gallery ‘Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies (2019-2022), is an ‘Installation de-categorising the world to reveal the wild disorder of nature’. Alicia used found and constructed images of phenomena, beings and objects, questioning ideas of nature and the differences in our world. 

Images Alicia has used range from interior of the earth to genome sequences to close up of ants eyes- suggests other ways of seeing, connecting and describing the world. 

Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies references art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, a collection of images mapping ‘art history without a text’. It also references a cluttered computer desktop or google image search. 

This installation combines images of various scales and contexts, carefully orchestrated configurations, drawn together by Alicia. 

In relation to my own work, Alicia is using found imagery and creating connections between each image, creating some sort of map. My own series of works create a map in a sense, there are connections that bring each image together- the algorithm, the internet itself. I am also making collages, this installation acts as a collage. 

Trying to plan artwork is a dire feat that I am still working my way around, but that being said, countless ideas continue to foster amongst the anxieties and experiences of everyday life. Alicia Frankovich’s Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies (2022) was recommended to me in my infant years of art school, this work impacting my own. Frankovich is a mega genius, she is someone who I aspire to be. And her practice and research are infinitely something I will continue to look into. Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies is an arrangement of lit-up panels, suspended in the air. Each panel displays a plethora of ‘phenomena’, such as rocks, fungi, plants, bones, viruses and microbes. Simon Gennard writes upon Frankovich’s work, stating, “each panel might be considered an attempt to wrest phenomena from existing systems of categorisation, stylistic affinity, periodisation and disciplinary containment, in order to invite a frenetic, plural reading of what makes up the world” (Gennard, 2023). Frankovich’s approach of organisation in her artwork is embodied; it is partial, “intended not to offer an alternative dogma, but to gesture towards one of many possible routes for thinking about distinctions, between life, non-life, actors and those acted upon” (Gennard, 2023). Frankovich states herself: 

“I have conceived of the Atlas as a shared space between species, taxonomies and identities in which one image might pollinate with another and thereby feed and sustain a whole community as though it were a forest”. 

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?

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.

Someone bought a painting from me, he was a friend of one of the studio residents and saw my work and like it enough to buy a piece! Super grateful.

The opening night was nice, with a lovely group of people coming through. It was a stormy day so I hope the exhibition made people feel a little more cozy.

The gallery space is interesting, as there is the open flow of studio residents coming in and out. This encouraged some foot traffic during the week while gallery sitting.

I personally think the place is inviting, despite the traditional white-walled gallery. Blue Door studios is a place that often holds DJ sets and gigs, and other various art performances. I hope it was a place for people to connect, and to engage with one another. I had so many conversations with people regarding their own experiences, and even reconnected with a few old friends who came through.

Overall, this dissemination process was rewarding, and the community at Blue Door is super supportive and encouraging. They all understood my theme! And recognised my work is internet based.

45 x 45cm

Acrylic and oil on canvas, 2024

90 x 120cm

100 x 100cm