PRESS RELEASE
Starting with digital photographs, William Betts’ scenes of leisure are filtered through multiple layers of technological intervention. Betts’ photographs are reorganized into pixels on a grid using his own proprietary software, then printed as a series of dots using a retrofitted CNC machine that ejects acrylic paint though a pneumatic valve. The perfectly uniform droplets of paint produce an image that feels familiar from afar, but abstracted and alien up close.
Julie Oppermann offers an intense visual experience maximizing moire patterns with contrasting colors that flicker and pulsate. Her paintings realize that perception can be deceiving, setting digital visualization against man-made optical illusion with flat surfaces that appear to vibrate and reference our ambiguous “it’s complicated” relationship with technology.
Photographing famed public parks from around the world, including Central Park (New York) and Hyde Park (Sydney), Gary Carsleyis interested in the fiction behind man made “natural” landscapes. Returning to his photographs, Carsley digitally repaints areas of color with patterns from faux wood grain contact adhesive paper, adding yet another layer of “fiction” upon his work while evoking a sense of “painting by numbers. The inclusion of Ikea furniture wrapped in his photographic print add yet another layer to this charade with furniture built from composite wood.
Using molecular modeling and multiple a 3D-printers, Shane Hope directs the formation of objects with shapes reminiscent of a diverse under water terrain from digital inception to physical product. The shapes are determined by the computer’s automatic decision-making process based on selected algorithmic formulae. Their resulting similarity to natural systems are uncanny, drawing a connection between Hope’s algorithms and the geometric principles behind our natural landscape. This emulated and remade product, which readily pronounces its synthetic origins, ultimately asks the viewer questions regarding the fast developing and increasingly consumer friendly possibilities of customizable production based on the technology to produce from the atom up.