This painting responds to the times in which we live. Times of pandemic, climate change, individual natural disasters, political decay, and failed wars. Sounds dire I know! Painting, for me, is a way to process what is happening. I hope you find what I 'see' of interest.
As Baudrillard, Virilio and others have noted, the effect of instantaneous delivery, onto our various screens, of news and images from hotspots around the world, draws us all into a kind of intimate experience that collapses distances of time and place. Virilio's "temporal compression" in a world of mayhem is a felt experience - a burden and an anguish. (1)
Intimate Distance invites you to fly. Are you above or below the drone and the strange eyes? Or are you in front of them or behind them? Can you move from one perspective to another? Are the eyes representative of people or are they fake eyes, representing surveillance technologies and systems? One eye's pupil displays a targeting graphic, another eye displays a screen. What is the relationship between these two eyes? There are a few possibilities.
Intimate Distance invites you to fly, to experiment with what I call 'imaginational metaveillance', a chance to imaginationally 'view' a big picture - to take yourself away and beyond. What kinds of patterns and anomalies can you 'see'. There is hope in the ability to move between and around different perspectives, both literal and metaphoric.
Here is an anomaly for you. The scape, whether you are looking up at a skyscape or down upon a landscape, attempts to show another kind of scape, one which is invisible but imposed on our environment. It is the scape of technological interconnectivity, networking and interoperability, enabled by harnessing frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum [EMS]. This new imposed 'landscape' of signals and nodes mediates human behaviour in ways that are not simply about material or visible hardware/devices. Are you aware of it?
And, there is more to think about!
Cheers,
Kathryn
(1.) Paul Virilio, The Original Accident, trans Juli Rose (Cambridge, MA and London, UK, Polity, 2007) p. 13.
