Painting, the act of creating a virtual space on a 2-D surface using colour, can be seen as the quintessential art object. It is, in fact, (perhaps) the only medium which is routinely, and definitively, regarded as "art" – by both casual museum goers and dedicated devotees of increasingly obscure conceptual articulations.
Contemporary approaches to creation have destabilized the category of art significantly, no approach moreso than digitalization. And, indeed, digitalization is increasingly less an approach than a banal pervasion which underwrites all other processes. Instructions in mediated binary code have effectively become the seed for which production must find a soil. (The book, the chair, the 3D model, the image, the car, the song, all a string of 0s and 1s, a coded instruction, requiring interpretation).
While often these processes begin their life in a computer, they are also sometimes brought in through an intermediary (a scanner, a camera, a microphone). In either case, the synthesized format bares, necessarily, the mark of its subjective birth -- the mark of its creator, or interpreter -- and sheds, necessarily, the physical qualities of a real "object."
It becomes, instead, virtual – containing traces of the physical and the potential to be made physical again, yet requiring mediation (a printer, or speaker, or router, or maker bot, or worker, or digital display) in order to be comprehensible to a human viewer.
This intermediary condition can be called an "amject:" for it is neither purely subject (i.e. A mental proposition) or purely object (i.e. A material entity or delineated form), but a strange amalgam of both. An amalgam which is, increasingly, the most common site of human engagement.
In Supporting Materials, Goerzen sets out to explore the implications of the amject via a direct exploration of the supporting media (canvas, board, paper) necessary for painting. By engaging these painting supports directly, without the use of paint, virtualizing them in verisimilitude via meticulous documentation, and interpreting them as canvases printed on canvas, a strange tautology of our contemporary moment is revealed: the hypothetical is merged with the actual.
Here are virtual amjects of actual canvases printed on actual canvases and allowed to function as canvas, supporting, as they do, a virtual space for a virtual space on a 2-d surface using paint (or CMYK, as it were).
A process of meticulous documentation and subjective interpretation becomes nearly invisible, the end product being tromple l'oeil reproductions of painting surfaces which still, necessarily, would easily serve the supporting function of the surfaces they depict, only revealing their virtual status in small aberrations (off white balances, reflections from flash photography, disparate shadows, divergent depths of field) and the edges' contiguity to the photographed artist's studio.
Everything is real, everything is virtual and the omega point is or was right around the corner, not far away now, in either direction.
TL;DR PAINTING SUPPORTS ARE METICULOUSLY DOCUMENTED AT A 1:1 SCALE AND PRINTED ONTO PAINTING SUPPORTS, EXPLORING THE ROLE OF THE SUBJECTIVELY INTERPRETED OBJECT AND THE RE-INTERPRETED AMJECT. THE VIRTUAL AND THE ACTUAL ARE MERGED INTO A NEW, SEEMLESS, FUNCTIONAL ENTITY, THE AMJECT.
untitled amject 06 (Saran wrapped canvas with rain drops)
2012
wooden stretcher, canvas, gesso, paper, Saran plastic wrap, cloudy daylight, rain drops, spot lights, 76 Nikon digital SLR photographs, Adobe Photoshop, canvas, inkjet
untitled amject 76 (tape on small gessoed prepared canvas)
2012
wooden stretcher, canvas, gesso, acrylic paint, sunlight, spot lamps, 73 Nikon digital SLR photographs, Adobe Photoshop, canvas, inkjet, painter's tape
* photograph by Coey Kerr
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untitled amject 34 (gesso on small wooden panel)
2012
wooden stretcher, wooden panel, studio wall, cloudy day, spot lights, 89 Nikon digital SLR photographs, Adobe Photoshop, canvas, inkjet, gesso
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untitled amject 34 (small wooden panel)
2012
wooden stretcher, wooden panel, cloudy day, spot lights, 89 Nikon digital SLR photographs, Adobe Photoshop, paper, inkjet, sheet acrylic, frame
untitled amject 34 (ezra's stretcher)
2012
wooden stretcher, felt tip marker, oil paint, acrylic paint, night time, spot lamps, flash, 34 Nikon digital SLR photographs, Adobe Photoshop, canvas, inkjet, oil paint
untitled amject 72 (Henri Matisse painting in small black frame)
2012
black wooden frame, glass, spot lamps, flash, 58 Nikon digital SLR photographs, high resolution Matisse image from MoMA digital archive, Adobe Photoshop, canvas, inkjet, painter's tape, Liquitex glossy acrylic medium
* photograph by Coey Kerr
untitled amject 03 (cinder brick)
2012
sunlight, 15 Nikon digital SLR photographs, Adobe Photoshop, paper, inkjet, dirt
