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Increasingly we are shutting out the 'real' world - real experience, real sex, real travel; we know ourselves and the 'other' through mediated or simulated experiences on the screen. Arthur Kroker's slogan "bodies in recline / bodies in decline", points to the consequences of our need to go virtual, to leave our bodies behind, to trash the world, to appear only as a telepresence. The group of paintings titled the REAL THING question our notions of what is 'real' what is simulated. Can we tell anymore? Do we care?
The medium of painting itself critiques the virtual through the implied touch of the artist's hand and the materiality of the paint and the support. Yet in these paintings, I see the surface as hovering somewhere between the screen and skin, caressed by my touch but with no tracking of the hand / brush visible, suspended, in the air. The colour glows, purposefully fake: video blue, blood red mutated into day-glow pink. Life has turned into still-life, frozen on the screen, reflected in glass, observed, recorded, transmitted, digitized, coded. Seductive in its virtual perfection. Beautiful but dead. In structure, the tall narrow bands to the left reference side bars. The abstract shapes which float across the surface another layer, perhaps a distilled meaning, perhaps an intervention which further disrupts the subject centered, perspectival space of Renaissance painting.
In these paintings, I was specifically addressing the presence of the woman, myself as flaneuse of the postmodern urban environment. I was interested in how these pervasive characteristics of visual accounting tend to implicate women most particularly. The gaze and the object of the gaze; woman viewing/desiring/consuming the commodity landscape - and - woman as viewed/desired/consumed; consumed by visible/invisible avatars of the gaze, in a theatre of contrivance. But in the postmodern city all of us are exposed. The surveillance camera, the postmodern flaneur , does not distinguish whether you are male or female , young or old. It tracks us reflecting our images back to ourselves and , present or not , we have internalized its gaze. Panoptic vision, formerly reserved for the architecture of places of incarceration - the jail, the mental institution - has spread to the transparent enclosures of skyscrapers. I look at the woman behind her desk, see the family photo beside her coffee cup, she looks at me looking at her and at the same time, reflected in the glass, I see me looking at her. The private, the home, was the woman's enclosure and the public, the city, the entire world ,was the roaming space of men. Women heard of the world 'second hand". Now we all see the world second hand. As we cozy down on the couch we become voyeurs, the public becomes private, the atrocities mingle with the popcorn.
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