This Site Is Under Construction: A Painting Installation

Abstract

This paper is intended to serve as a supporting document for the exhibition This Site Is Under Construction that was held at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, University of Waterloo, April 17th – May 14th, 2010.

The work explores the ways in which we constitute and mediate our specific place in a space that is constantly changing. It is concerned with notions surrounding how we make and perceive images now in our computerized visual culture and the ways in which we can mark a subjective painting aesthetic and visual vocabulary. The painting installation, “This Site Is Under Construction”, investigates the effects of new media and digitization on experiential perception, and the nature of making and re-configuring images. The title alludes not only to the on-line, virtual space of the computer, but also to the physical spaces of building and urban development sites. The subjects for the paintings are spaces in flux – specific locales of construction and building sites that are in-between states of development – placing emphasis on the mechanized devices that fabricate the new structures. The paintings themselves reveal seemingly spontaneous and optically warped immersive spaces; alternative architectural environments which subvert interpretations of two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms of visual presentation and recognition. The work aims to contrast outward appearance and illusionistic staging as it relates to both the picture and its support.