| Schedule | About | Exhibitions | Press | Submission | Links | Contact |
|
|
March 19 - Derek Brueckner
Paintings of Performance: Opening Reception: Derek Brueckner Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
E-mail: derekbrueckner[at]gmail.com Statement of Research Interests "...shifting patterns of consumption initiate new experiences of embodiment; and embodied experience interacts with codes of representation to generate new kinds of textual worlds. In fact, each category--production, signification, consumption, bodily experience, and representation--is in constant feedback and feedforward loops with the others." "The great inventions are tragic... You don't accept them as facts. You get inside of them, and fight them. For the moment, were not doing it. The Ancients did it. Whether they were philosophers, painters, architects, they fought against technology and they fashioned something else out of it." By combining and recontextualizing the above ideas, I create dialectics involving representation/identity issues of the body in relation to painting and current advanced technologies. Through fusing the act of painting with technology, it is my intention to reinvent the entrenched tradition of representing the body in the context of a technological and dematerialized culture. My overall research explores corporeal imagery by means of combining the digital with painting. This work reconstitutes the body in terms of how it feels and perceives: in current culture, the senses of the body are being replaced by advanced technologies that act as prosthetics for physical experiences in a sonic paced and dematerialized digital reality. Paul Virilio discusses how machines have become the new opticians, and the speed that information disseminates now takes precedence over content quality. The act of painting resists the technological delirium by which our bodily identity is being dissolved; yet the digital component of my practice also embraces new possibilities for reconfiguring the body in terms of digital and physical hybrids. Current post-human ideas suggest that due to new advanced technologies embodiment may no longer require a physical presence. As well these technologies change the paradigm of time and space by simultaneously fragmenting, replicating and interconnecting the body to various technological systems such as wireless networks or cybernetic environments. In my work surreal corporeal entities (which often have a gender ambiguity) reference the body's relationship to this shift in time and space. The imagery and process of my work is about the polemics of imaginary and real, virtual/digital and physical, gender specificity and androgyny, intimacy and repression, visually uncomfortable and decorative, and the overall ambivalence of the body's relation to advanced technologies. In the digital work, a single digital image is slowly manipulated through a Photoshop process where one area at a time is spliced, duplicated, mirrored, rotated and seamlessly merged. In many of the works this digital process is obsessively repeated in the working image until it reaches an asymmetrical composition referencing fractals, microbiology, mutation and/or cell division. In examining my work from the last ten years I now recognize most of that work as an assortment of hybrid versions between the technological and the physical. Borrowing from Peter Anders and his architectural theories of the "Cybrid", which is "an environment or artifact that incorporates both physical and cyberspaces". Anders discusses that the Cybrid is the "threshold connection" between the physical and cyberspace. I perceive my work to involve various versions of a pictorial Cybrid. I am reinterpreting Anders in conjunction with a pictorial space that is primarily associated with painting. My future goals for research include expanding variations of "threshold connections" by expanding the haptic options within combinations of a physical and digital environment. It is my hope to reveal more corporeal imagery through unique combinations of painting, printmaking, performance, video and photography with the digital. - Derek Brueckner C.V. |
|
|||||||
