STATEMENT

THE PAINTINGS

My current work addresses the idea of the voyeuristic gaze as a social phenomenon and its relationship to pictorial representation. Specifically, I am interested in how this translates from an objectification of the figure within the history of painting to that which is more recently seen in cinema, the Internet, and other mass media.

I have aimed to develop a visual language unique to painting that emulates the optical qualities of photographic and digital imagery. The choice to work with such a paradox within the subject matter is informed by the ever-changing relationship to my surroundings. In considering technology’s ability to extend the limits of sight, I portray inner psychological space as the intimate domestic space…as reclusive and vulnerable environments observed through an inquisitive mechanical lens.

A part of my creative process consists of adopting a voyeuristic role, and photo documenting my subjects engaging in their daily routine. Artificially illuminating the spaces, I am referencing painting’s historical precedent of the representation of light as metaphor. To counter this consciously personalized approach to my work, I also paint from appropriated visual materials, such as film stills or Internet derived digital stills. These provide me with a more random and objective representation of the everyday. I look to compose scenarios in my paintings that contain narrative tension and which establish an ambiguous relationship between the viewer and the subject.

THE DRAWINGS

The drawings explore a process of constructing narrative. I was interested in the variety of associations created through an intuitive juxtaposition of personal and found imagery dealing with ideas of male and female relationships. The drawings were conceived to be displayed on a wall in a grid or a story-board like format, about five drawings across but in random order, with each depicted scenario functioning as a piece of a greater story. There is no order to the ‘reading’ of the sequence. The imagery can be referenced across the story-board format and no particularly clear narrative or meaning is implied.

Among the evening’s most notable showings was an exhibition of works by young painters at Carrie Secrist Gallery “Struck: New Paintings by New Painters,” contained the work of seven up-and-coming artists, each of which straddled the boundary between realism and abstraction, creating works that tested the limits of a medium that has long been presumed to be exhausted. Although the exhibition, which was curated with the assistance of Chicago artist Richard Hull, was consistent in its quality and well worth seeing at least once as a whole, the recent paintings of one included artist, Michael Antkowiak, were especially eye-catching and conceptually provocative.

His works selected for Secrist’s exhibition consisted of Richter-esque paintings based on still images culled from a variety of voyeuristic perspectives, such as security cameras or, perhaps, a webcam. Though at first viewing, it may seem as though these works merely perpetuate the lineage of photo-realist painting - particularly in their replication of all the nuances of photography, including graininess - they bring up interesting issues regarding the limitations of both painting and the subject: what is lost in the laborious reproduction of the instantaneous? Is such a constructed perspective as objectifying as it would be if captured in a photograph? Antkowiak’s stylized yet blunt paintings are a welcome hybrid of painting, photography and context - the best of numerous such examples in a superbly curated exhibition.

Written by Britany L. Salsbury

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