Joe Hedges
Region: West
The tension between a digitally networked, screen-based experience of the world and a physical, tactile experience has never been more acute. My works reflect this fragmented reality by combining painting on canvas with screens, tablets, and other electronics and consumer goods. The painted portions of my works function as images but also as symbols and archetypes of oil painting itself, pointing toward painting’s capacity for slowness, its fraught history, and its unique physical presence. By looking at painting as a form of media technology—and recent tech as creative material—I try and see contemporary forms of media more objectively and thus more critically. In doing so I channel my own discomfort with the slippery present into precarious, momentary wholes.
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