Hybrida Artist in Residence, 2021
Hybrida was a residency programme that occurred in two parts between 24th June - 6th August 2021, organised by Giorgos Tsiongas and Joar Torbiörnsson, culminating in an exhibition from the 6th - 19th August in Älvsbacka, Sweden, titled Moisture Technē. Between the 24th June - 20th July it was an online residency, and between the 23rd July - 6th August it was an offline residency in Älvsbacka.
During my time on the residency I continued to build on an ongoing body of work concerning digital personas and performing for social media, titled Studio View. The studio building was a former garage and, for the final group exhibition, I installed my works around the building in an attempt to interact with the history of the space, bridging the relationship between the manual labour of the past with the predominantly digital labour of the present. During the residency I worked closely with and in the same studio as Stockholm based artist Mary Furniss, so for the final exhibition we decided to exhibit our works together in a couple of different locations around the building.
Below is an excerpt about my work from the printed publication that accompanied the final exhibition.
Sat in front of a glowing screen, I crawl across the internet, saving and highlighting photographs of brightly lit artist studios. These images, featuring stern faced painters posing in front of colourful canvases, are destined to be altered and re-distributed across the web, pushed out into the infinite scroll for the uninformed to mindlessly flick through on their way to the gym or ordering drinks at a bar. Doctored and subtly distorted, they feature digitally created artworks, although within this context they are seen as large-scale physical paintings, from rotting cars to the inside of Amazon warehouses and drone strikes.
The act of pushing these images out into the digital sphere is to further a growing persona of a painter, one that inhabits messy studios, is an occasional smoker and has a dubiously high artistic output. By utilising tools honed by those wishing to destabilise governments, I too hope to capitalise on people’s negligence to research what they see and consume online.
Each new body of work I produce is accompanied by a series of fabricated studio images, and are regularly translated off of the screen and into the real, created as printed and painted onto original artworks. These physical hybrid paintings are complemented by translucent 3D printed sculptures of paint tubes, ghost like forms that explore ideas surrounding transparency in the digital age.
