From Oct. 21 to Oct. 25, Zavitz gallery showcased works by various artists from the University of Guelph’s Fine Arts department. Some artists were former students from the University of Guelph and others are still continuing their practice in the Fine Arts program. The exhibition, curated by Angel Callander, was named Pixels and Paint, and it presented the audience with the influence that digital culture has had on contemporary art practice.
It is evident that contemporary art practice has embraced the digital culture, and it consequently demands for people to engage with the digital world. Artists live alongside its affect on the workings of the everyday life, and the change in new materials (such as a shift towards new digital media) has begun to change aspects of traditional art practices. Painters have begun to show an interest in the aesthetics of the digital image in the manner of incorporating pixilation, video stills, references to digital photography, and the appropriation of well-known images and memes from Internet sources.
“The artist in Pixels and Paint are tied to the impacts of digital culture, whether …intentional or not,” said Callander. “Each artist’s work has been selected for the way it fits into a critique of the effects of digital culture on contemporary art-making. In this way, we can begin to look at the different ways in which artists engage with the digital in their respective practices.”
The photo installation on the left wall titled Not My Photos, Not Your Camera (Provisional Histories of Oct. 12), by Sam de Lange, is a visually dominant piece in which a tale is told of a camera stolen by an unknown man in Brazil. The artist was able to trace the photographs taken by the stolen camera as they were uploaded to the Internet with the camera’s serial number. A large portion of the photographs that were uploaded referred to what is known as “Children’s Day” in Brazil, which falls on Oct. 12. A Brazilian doll company created this day in an attempt to sell more dolls on what was originally the feast day of the patron saint of Brazil. The photographs were organized on the wall with a doll that was hanged, and responded to the idea of how a holy day evolved into a commercial holiday, as traced through the Internet.
Steph Garas’ digital photograph, which had been cracked and manipulated by heat, represents the manipulation of a digitally made work with a volatile product of the material world. As Callander said, its large size allowed viewers to consider the parameters of digital photography in which images can be made larger and smaller with a few clicks on a computer.
The works of Dudan McEwan, Sally Harrison, and Jazmyn Pettigrew shared similar elements. They used pixilated aesthetics in composition with conventional artistic materials such as canvas, wood, and paint. These works appeared to be low-resolution digital images from afar; however, once the viewer approached the works, imperfections and textures were purposely created to compose images that referenced digital culture and its influence on society. These works successfully illustrated what the public would recognized as pixilated images while on the contrary, they were well composed paintings. McEwan’s painting was different in that it was a representational image rather than a set of abstract “pixels.” The image is historical art reference to Piero Manzoni’s famous Merde d’artista.
On the right wall, Nadine Maher’s paintings were shown using digital photography as a reference for their imagery. The reliance on digital culture was evident, as the source of the image first existed in a digital camera before being painted. The nighttime images, copied from the lights and darks of photographs, are reminiscent of the tenebrism (extreme contrast of light and dark) in Baroque painting. This showed that traditional historical art practices still hold an important place among all of the new methods and aesthetics of art making in the digital age.
Pixels and Paint assembled a collection of works that called to attention the vast field of influence from the digital world on contemporary art.