Black River Running #10

Background: This work positions itself in a field of painting research that seeks to find a critical space from which to negotiate the changing technologies and regimes of representation. From the vantage point of the post-digital age, it asks how contemporary painting might meet the technological turns of screen recording and seeing, and in the process, develop a range of appropriate and necessary responses that extend the possibilities of this artistic modality. As art historian David Joselit (2009) Instead of being a self-contained entity, painting establishes relations with the broader social and economic network of the time and in doing so remains relevant. Joselit, D, 2009, Painting Beside Itself, October, (130), pp.125–134. Contribution: The key aim of my research is to examine how digital technologies (screens) are reshaping, through repetition and variation, sharing and distributing, and indeed through what might be called new ways of seeing, the changing nature of the human subject. By carefully working through issues of the hyperreal and by association, simulation, I seek to rupture and transform our understanding of what constitutes ‘the real’. My work offers a layering of visual and conceptual strategies that both reveal the processes of meaning brought about by digital manipulation while at the same time offering a counter-position that argues for the value of coherence in the formation of human subjectivity. Significance: The work was included in the RMIT Gallery exhibition, Analogue Art in A Digital World (2018-2019), which surveyed the work of 20 Australian artists to reveal how digital visual culture is framing and influencing the aesthetic, material, and conceptual choices of contemporary artists. The exhibition was curated by painters Sam Leach (an Archibald and Wynne Landscape prize winner) and Tony Lloyd. A symposium and catalogue accompanied the exhibition.