HYPERSURFACE - Painting in a virtual world
31st May - 12th July 2008
Ovada (Oxfordshire Visual Arts Development Agency), Oxford.

Organised in partnership with Rod Barton Invites. Curated by Michael Stubbs.

Diann Bauer, Ian Monroe, Perry Roberts, Danny Rolph,
Jost Muenster, DJ Simpson, Michael Stubbs, Caragh Thuring

The artists in this exhibition take process painting into the 21st century by engaging with the flattened visual space of digital media which has increasingly become part of our everyday experience.

The artists in Hypersurface accelerate the prescribed languages of hand-made paintings and objects (or painted objects) by acknowledging their relationship to virtual and digital media. These artists make object/paintings in the understanding that the 'non-space' of the flat world of the computer screen and virtual terminal creates a complex relationship with the artist making and the object made in physical space.

Some of these artists reference and incorporate the digital into the very fabric or surfaces of their works (Muenster, Monroe, Stubbs). Others re-contextualise the making of object/paintings by reconfiguring the printed images of art history and popular culture (Roberts, Rolph, Thuring). Others still prefer to extend outward from the flat world of the digital surface through a process of re-building into the physical world (Bauer, Simpson). However, all seamlessly and repeatedly cross-over these distinctions - operating through any one or all of them simultaneously.

For these artists, making object/paintings in relation to the immediacy of non-physical virtual communication means that an expanded palette of cultural references becomes available; any useful signifier from art history and popular culture can be recovered or re-mixed as seems necessary.