OLIVIA MARGARET FRANCES
My practice is concerned with the screen and how it mediates our relationship with images. I think of this relationship in a romantic sense, the screen becomes an interloper or barrier, creating distance between the audience and the image and it is within this distance that I try to situate my paintings. I work primarily on corduroy, the lined textile provides a dual-layer painting surface, I aim to create a dissonance or hover between the two layers, reminiscent of the haze/glow of the screen.
I am interested in how we construct narratives out of various cultural debris. I collect images online, often stills from films, that communicate something about looking. I am plucking these images out of digital circulation and recontextualising them amongst other imperfect images, where they have the potential to form new associations and narratives.
Once chosen, these images undergo a process of degradation and translation through cropping, editing and painting. I try to increase the distance between my painting and the original image just enough, so it is no longer recognisable but retains a vague familiarity, allowing a false sense of nostalgia to form. I find comfort in something identifiably counterfeit, the staged lives and narratives of cinema, the grain or pixel that reminds you what you're looking at is an image. Film grain, pixelation, dust, and glare, are becoming increasingly scarce as technology improves and moves us towards an ever higher definition image. I am not trying to recreate these old textures but interpret them through the language of painting, it is more about alluding to them and their influence on the way we see.
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