Sunday, September 30, 2012

Creating dynamic art with popular digital technologies

Over the past decade or so, Wade Guyton has emerged as a pioneer of groundbreaking works, which explore our changing relationships to artworks and images through the usage of popular digital technologies like the desktop computer, scanner, and inkjet printer. The artist’s misuse, rather purposeful, of these tools to make drawings and paintings leads to beautiful accidents, which relate to day-to-day lives often punctuated by blurred images and misprinted photos on our computer screens and phone.

The Whitney Museum of American Art is now hosting a show, entitled ‘Wade Guyton OS’. Here, OS standing for operating system. Comprising more than eighty works dating from 1999 to the present, it’s the first ever midcareer survey of this New York–based artist. It features a non-chronological design in which the viewer is confronted by staggered rows of parallel walls like a book’s layered pages or stacked windows on a ubiquitous monitor.

On the eve of his show, the artist said in an interview that he never really relished the idea of art classes or drawing. He was brought up in a small place in Tennessee and would prefer to play video games or be seated in front of television.  About a decade ago, he could not find a dealer and hardly anyone paid serious attention to his art. Now the artist is represented by Chelsea-based Friedrich Petzel Gallery, and has renowned collectors keen to buy his artworks, many of which are in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, to name a few.

The exhibit comprises paintings, drawings, sculpture, and photography. It concludes with a couple of spectacular canvases that stretch up to 50ft, He has created them specifically for the Marcel Breuer–designed building of Whitney. The title, ‘Wade Guyton OS’, uses a computer operating system’ common acronym, linking his art to the latest technologies of this ear.

The Whitney Museum of American Art showcase a wide range of twentieth-century as well as contemporary art, with a focus on the living artists’ works. The Whitney collects, preserves and interprets high quality art.

No comments:

Post a Comment