About the Artwork
Digital plein air paintings of the life I used to live Series 2020
An archival project and a conceptual meditation on the state of photography in a time of automated image making on a massive scale. Curating images from Google street view, an effort to document everything in the world that could be seen from a moving car. A massive, undiscerning machine for image-making whose purpose is to simply capture everything, Street View takes photographs without apparent concern for ethics or aesthetics, from a supposedly neutral point of view.
This starting point acting as the canvas, the work is then brought around the creation and distribution of digital files, manipulating, stretching, and carving them up while using digital paintbrushes to make her brushstrokes, combining these with the manipulated and appropriated images. Almost an idea of digital abstract impressionism; small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles; the work adheres to the visual structure lies at the heart of much contemporary art as well as being an idea principle for the web. These seemingly complex work aim for simplicity and harmony, revealing
themselves over time, engaging with the past present, and future to inspire meditations on color, form, and the relationship with the tools in the act of art-making itself.
Series emerged in response to changing conditions for contemporary art viewership, the lack of physical presence in a gallery due to a global pandemic lockdown, forcing the artist to move an entire ideology to the digital realm, harnessing its tools and physicality.
About the Artist
ZAR (0270501) is foremost inspired primarily by the art movements of abstract expressionism and gutai, and almost as a contrast, expresses its response from its own individuality. The two main art movements are responses to the culture that were present in their existence. The countries that these movements emerged from was still reeling from the collapse of world order, triggering a major influence for the
movementsʼ artists – many of whom still remembered the experiences that afforded them the opportunity to develop, search, and respond to the societal uncertainty. A represented radical and energetic approach to art-making that took advantage of the newly found freedoms to move forward from the depression of war to the newly democratic freedom available to their homeland.
As ZAR is based from the representation of modern Manila, the society mirrors the survival of creativity. In the days of celebrity in art where the artistʼs lifestyle becomes a motif, an extension of the artwork itself, ZAR cultivates an aura of secrecy further exploring the notions of obscurity the world and the internet landscape provided. The secrecy becomes an ironic state of affairs given their total absence from the scene – perhaps suggesting a more realistic representation and connection both to the art and artist.
