Venus of Miami, 2023
oil on canvas, 108" x 60"
This large painting references Botticelli's classic "The Birth Of Venus". Instead of a demure Simonetta arriving on the placid shores of Cyprus on a scallop shell, the Miamian Venus is in a fraught landscape remixed by A.I. The shell has morphed into a beached carcass and she is surrounded by lesser gods distorted by technology, the way the swollen Bay of Biscayne is distorted by the Miami Beach skyline in the distance. The multi-ethnic Venus is engaging the viewer directly, as if inquiring their position in the tensions between humanity and the artificial, nature and the manufactured.
"Botticelli's Venus Standing On A Beach” 2022
oil on canvas, 36in x 36in
"Wading Venus”, 2023
oil on canvas, 34in x 34in
"Venus After The Storm”, 2023 oil on canvas, 36in x 36in
Available as a Limited Edition Print
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I've been intrigued and unnerved by the AI imagery that's lately flooding our feeds.
Some artists are worried these computer dreams will replace us, in some cases they will through simple saturation as they add to the field of visual products and enable anyone the thrill of willing into the world new images through something that resembles a slot machine more than creativity. It's too early to tell what reach this will have but likely huge.
Artists were already remixing and pastiching the past, which is what AI is doing, mining the vast reference library of existing imagery to bring forth new combinations. At this stage of prompt-to-image technology, there’s a liminal moment where its generative faculties produce startling images, yet with an unknown disturbing quality, especially when it comes to human anatomy. This hurdle is being cleared as we speak, and I imagine the strangeness will dissipate (unfortunately) as the AI "perfects" its mimicry of this strange notion that is beauty with all its cultural baggage.
I set out to produce a series of images based on a well known reference and standard of beauty, the Birth of Venus by Botticelli, suspecting the AI would stumble and produce something closer to alien and uncanny.
The results felt strangely related to the motifs I’ve been working on for the past years with my neo-romantic landscapes.
Selecting one of these grotesque Venuses, and recreating it in an oil painting as if the AI image were a study, I complete a circuit that began with speaking to a machine, bringing the result back from the electronic world into something tangible. In choosing not to alter the image beyond the natural changes that come from the medium and the paint handling, there’s a degree of separation that happens with the AI interceding in the creative process that I find fascinating, portraying an unknown landscape that only exists through an incantation.
The term "Distancing Effect" comes from German playwright Berthold Brecht's tactic of defamiliarization in art, that sought to disrupt the audience's need for identifying with the subject and so forcing a direct engagement with the ideas present.This exhibition presents a collection of works that expands on my themes of “posthumanist romanticism” that began with landscapes in 2016.
In these paintings, broken forms are rendered in a manner influenced by the 19th Century Romantics, echoing the pre- occupations of that era’s artists, confronted with massive technological upheaval and the desecration of the natural world as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution.The new revolution is technological and happening at exponential speeds. In exploring the unsettling results produced by artificial intelligence, I’m intrigued by the uncanny quality of what's peering back at us through the looking glass. How much is us and how much is other? Are we becoming something new the more we inhabit the digital world?
Besides my series of "inhuman portraits", I’ve mined the iconic reference of “The Birth of Venus”, a historical paragon of Western feminine beauty, put through a (by now) primitive AI program that interprets harmonious shapes as strange new forms yet carries over cultural baggage from the source material.In recasting the results in oil paint, I complete a circuit where the end result is a hand-made object, a one-of-a-kind physical representation of a collaboration with a machine.
Sociobiologist E.O. Wilson calls humanity an evolutionary chimera, picking up things from every age without fully transitioning out of any one era, characterized by “Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” The chimeras in my paintings are a reflection of this predicament of ours.