Still Newfoundland is a series of 9 two-dimensional collages. I collected wild flora and foliage while hiking in Newfoundland and supplemented that material with bought flowers. I scanned the plants by putting them directly on a home office scanner, thereby digitized them at very high resolutions (1,600 pixels per inch). The shallow depth of field of the scanner renders the parts of the plants that are touching the glass in extreme detail but the imagery sharpness falls off quickly. By placing the flowers and foliage on a flat-bed scanner I can play with perspective. The resulting images have an unusual orientation that I could not obtain by taking a photograph of them. I then collage the digitized images together to create the compositions. Each image would be 6 feet square if it were printed out as intended. The files I’m working with are between 3 and 6 gigabits depending on how many layers they contain because they are so large and detailed.
This work is a meditation on the nature of nature. By combining flowers and leaves gathered locally in Newfoundland with bought flowers from many different geographic regions the work interrogates our conception of the natural and the local. How in the era of the Anthropocene do we understand the interconnected global environment? I’m interrogating the history of plant migration and cultivation. The work also investigates notions of beauty and fascination with nature’s forms and means—for example, the exacting detail of tiny filaments, repeat pattern, incredibly subtle colour gradations. It also references the compositional qualities, luminosity and symbolism of historical work such as the memento mori.
This installation uses the tropes of disco lighting and cast shadows to project poetry created from promising and sly found text from thousands of spam emails. The most poignant contemporary reminder of the gap between what is real and ideal is the internet, where one spends nightly hours on personal searches; and advertisements flutter, pop up and highjack concentrated and intimate moments. Particularly manipulative and passive-aggressive, the title of this installation, Everybody Deserves Love, Even You, was the subject line of an email. Its despondent tone addresses contemporary cultural vulnerabilities, sadness, yearnings and desperation upon which marketers pray.
All spam is about personal allure, the attainment of beauty, love, power or wealth. Everybody Deserves Love, Even You imitates the endless variation of these virtual promises. Various spelling tactics are employed so that recipients understand the message but computer programs do not. The messages are concocted in endless variations: often funny, always bizarre, and occasionally poetic. Reminiscent of the seductive murmur of a foreign language, a sexualized computer voice whispers the text. The overly modulated and controlled cadence emphasizes the pervasiveness and monotony of spam, while at the same time, characterizing and transmogrifying the text.
Viewers bathe in the projected text, inducing a sense of spotlight and performance, and therefore a feeling of love and attention. In channeling text through disco ball reflections, the macho messages are feminized through stereotypical associations of vanity and sparkle. The light touches viewers specifically and personally and is at the same time, mass-produced and mass projected. Mimicking the glow from computer screens, the work deflects and co-opts the bottom of the barrel strategies used by virtual marketers into a joyful moment that straddles the real and the virtual.
By taking on a feminist strategy of using alternate surfaces, claiming disregarded floors and ceilings, the work focuses viewers’ attention on spaces and concepts that are often neglected and taken for granted. In a neo-feminist twist, the obnoxious is ‘made pretty’ through playful colour: co-opting the mostly ‘male’ oriented spam spewings.
Everybody Deserves Love, Even You emphasizes the seemingly permanent ubiquity of spam as a shared experience and universal language – words that are largely ignored but still imbued with the power of omnipresence.
-Anastasia Hare
This hybrid reality installation, really [this show is rented] is a mixed reality installation exhibited at Redhead Gallery,Toronto, Ontario, and concurrently shown at The Heldscalla Foundation, Buttemere, Second Life. The piece is comprised of performance and interaction, involving the participation of the artist, her Second Life avatar, Nar Duell, and virtual and real gallery visitors.
The components for the installation were rented — lights, projectors, streaming server, classic office-accessory rubber-plants and space. These 'by the week' artifacts emphasize the transitory nature of virtual existence.
A key component of really [this show is rented] is the iterative loop—streaming video of the Red Head gallery space into the Second Life gallery. The completion of the loop occurs by projecting Second Life onto the wall of the real gallery, subsequently one watches one's self in action.The inevitable narcissism of a Second Life existence, and evidently a real existence, is mirrored by the technology.
This series is created from flowers, leaves and insects, directly scanned at high resolutions. The results are the beautiful colours and textures of the flowers and petals combined with any dust on the scanner surface, flaws in the scanning process and other unexpected objects like dead bugs. The texture of the petals end up feeling fabric-like or maybe even like skin and the details of the fly and bee are incredible. One viewer upon seeing one of the Still prints said:
Who would have known that...the edge of a dying flower could turn into a wave of an orange ocean, cradling a dead fly that reminds us of a sleeping baby. (Suzanne Smith)
Floorcloths, surfaced designed canvasses, traditionally used as floor coverings, reflect an ongoing attachment to the visual, particularly decorative domestic structures and imagery. This interest stems from the perpetual dialogue in the art world about alternate aesthetic practice and history, namely issues around feminism and the re-evaluation of what has been traditionally labeled women's work. I am making a series of floorcloths (domestic, functional objects) through a process of layering and melding, with paint and heat transferred imagery.
One of the most vivid references for the floorcloth imagery of this installation are the Dutch vanitas paintings of the 17th century. These paintings were an expression of the ephemeral nature of life and pleasure—a morality lesson. Flowers and flies populate my floorcloths as they did vanitas paintings. As much as the floorcloths refer to a history of painting they also negate that allusion by their functionality, impertinence and horizontal orientation. This is art to walk on. Even the viewing perspective creates a dizzying sense of vertigo and dictates a new way of looking.
Floorcloths have always been primarily about pretension. They were a poor man’s Persian carpet—thin, flat, paint taking the place of rich, warm tufted wool. They have the subversive power of a fake or a facsimile.
Quilts often utilize found fabric, worn with markings of use—a whole created from bits and pieces. It is an additive, layering process—sampling and piecing imbued with improvisational impulses and feedback. Likewise the sound and moving image, collaged digitally are gatherings of both seemingly disparate and consciously connected elements.