Suzanne Walters
Region: Northeast
How can painting and drawing, with all of their material slowness, accommodate contemporary influences such as advertising and digital culture? I am concerned with how traditional genres continue to take form in a culture where the image is now the primary vehicle for communication - from the ubiquitous oversized advertising image to the relatively intimate desktop icon.
In this latest body of work, I take screensavers and online animations as subjects in a material-based exploration of representation. I am interested in them as highly crafted and manipulated spaces for pause, and as such - in their unlikely relationship to painting. My sources are varied, ranging from Macintosh OSX screensavers to the Museum of Modern Art's website. Using these found images as a starting point, I make large-scale drawings on paper that further alter images whose own artifice already suggested other manipulations - such as Church's utopian Hudson River Valley or modern works in MoMA's own permanent collection.
My work alludes to the photograph, high modernism, illusionistic space and commonplace imagery equally. With these various image sources come their formal conventions and contextual underpinnings, which also serve as subject matter for the work. I am also concerned with the reception of images in our daily lives and the point at which they become personalized or meaningful. I am attempting to use contemporary media and technology as generative tools in order to locate my project's place in and about representation.