Abstract
While the perception of the image appears to be in the eye, the apprehension of the image occurs in the mind. The modern apparatus of the image, including painting and photography, has evolved concurrently since the mid-1800s, with emergent digital technologies and affordances for the sharing of images - our “new normal” - only possible since the mid-1990s. Oil painting has long been declared dead as a medium of image creation. Yet, painting persists even as we have entered a post-medium and post-digital era of image creation and consumption. This paper explores the contemporary paradigm of perceiving oil painting through the digital image - the thumbnail on Instagram, for example, as perceived by the viewer on their iPhone. This simulacrum is utterly divorced from the painting’s medium, scale and materiality yet functions as the pharmakon upon which our apprehension of the image is often predicated. This practice-based research seeks to apprehend painting as a medium-specific embodied practice grounded in materiality to situate painting, the painted image and the lens of photography in the larger post-digital and post-medium context where the painted image is often consumed, shared, and discussed. This phenomenological research locates the democratic aesthetics of painting in a contemporary and historical consideration of the apparatus of the image. Findings from this research contribute to the discussion of materiality in image creation in this post-medium, post-digital moment, at the nascent of the AI-generated image.
Presenters
Jennifer Lee WiebeDoctoral Student and Part-time Faculty, Art Education, Concordia University, Quebec, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Image, Materiality, Painting, Post-digital, Post-medium
