(Life)Like What we are up to...
Life(Like) is a concept we are working on for our May exhibition at State of the Art Gallery. It explores the oscillating relationship between the real (physical) world and virtual reality, focusing specifically on the social media platform of Instagram. Our aim with this body of work is to paint contemporary images that have not been captured in the medium of paint before. To this end, we focus our attention on internet meme versions of age old genres. So for instance, the portrait or self-portrait is replaced by selfies and groupies. We also pay special attention to new ways in which people position or move themselves; for example, planking can be considered to be a new way people hold themselves unlikely to be found in portraits by the old masters. Still lives have been replaced by food porn, cat photos and “what’s in my bag” photos. Again the objects in these new still lives are arranged in ways that have largely not been used in paintings before: the objects are often captured from an aerial viewpoint and include contemporary objects like cell phones and sunglasses. The artworks for this project are made up of a series of actions that start off in the real world, an Instagrammer takes a photo of a physical object, person, or scene, and posts the image on Instagram, thereby making the real, virtual. We go through our Instagram feeds or search specific hashtags and “like” certain images. We then make these images real again by capturing and painting them. We then push them back to the virtual world by “reposting” these images (often a few times during the painting process) and “tagging” the original image maker. That person then often “likes” our posts, comments on it and may even repost it back to their account. By adding certain hashtags to our reposted images we also get likes and comments from “likeminded” people. Thus, the process has come full circle and the artwork does not just consist of the painting but of the interaction between the two worlds and the likes, comments, and “regrams” the image gets.
