Painting serves as a generator for all of my work, it is an autonomous act which enables the gestation of ideas, simply through enacting its process of production.
Through the process of painting, I actively investigate concepts of contemporary art as a Post-Internet Practice.
Screen sized works are informed by hand-held networked technology being ubiquitous in everyday life and acknowledge the effect of the Internet upon the artwork and its distribution process.
The images in the paintings above were mostly harvested from the Internet via my smartphone and were then reproduced either as small screen sized paintings, aka micro oil-paintings (7 x9 cm) or on A4 canvases to fit a standard scanner bed. Thus making light of the process of producing, documenting and distributing works.
Following production / documentation, the paintings are sometimes exhibited in a “flash mob” style by the artist, forming temporary self-organised fluid interventions in public spaces. At this point the paintings again are documented and the image of them intervening is redistributed online, joining a throng of existing digital images.
This conscious post-production process incorporates the viral image distribution tactics favoured by social networks to enable a wider (potentially international) dissemination of the painting(s).
Distributing the paintings online, ensures that the paintings become images viewed through a screen, further-replicating their source material and adding layers into the viewing process.
Image-sources for the paintings are fragile and transient (often found through Google image searches) and can generally only viewed through a screen.
Unstable imagery rendered in oil-paint transforms an insecure temporal image into a permanent solid object, charting a relationship with screens as extensions of ourselves, always prepared for public broadcast, echoes the anxiety of hyper self-awareness. To paint is to delight in texture, to experience first hand that which cannot be experienced through a screen. Selected Paintings can be purchased directly here for enquires please email nina.coulson@network.rca.ac.uk for sales or exhibition enquires.