Description:
Images inhabit a multitude of niches in daily life, their permeation throughout society has even coined the term, “photographic memory”. The classic idea of representation explains that the re-presentation of a place or thing was understood to be based on an external, objective idea of reality. This existence was seen as both static and stable where representations succeeded an experience. In the wake of mechanically reproduced imagery, (the internet being a paramount example) the duplication of exact and similar images have inundated the psyche with representations of representations. The location of an original has become lost in the sea of simulacra, or the copy without an original.
My current practice involves an investigation into the aesthetics of the eighteenth century Venetian painter Canaletto and the contemporary phenomenon of the website Flickr. Canaletto made numerous paintings of vedutas, or views of Venice, each one encapsulating the experience of “the most unique city in the world”. By searching Flickr for the very same views that Canaletto painted I found similarities between the Flickr snapshot and an image by Canaletto. The motive to extract congruity became necessary in order to find a friction that runs parallel to the theoretical concerns of a simulated experience. The image of Venice through Canaletto’s paintings has over time conditioned our minds and effectively has been “seen” prior to the actual experience of interacting with Venice as a city in Italy. It could be understood now that the experience of Venice has been constructed not only through Canaletto’s paintings, but also through the prevailing conditions of Flickr culture in which a search yeilds thousands of images that are more or less the same and the amount grows daily.
Through combining the separate formats of the physical tourist snapshot with the digital image of a Canaletto view from Flickr, a series of “postcard” paintings have been made in order to examine the social conditioning of tourism. The photograph of a place taken by a tourist, or the postcard that acts as a materialized memory, reaffirms this situation that what is being seen isn’t an individual’s own view, but the vantage point of hundreds.
In another series of paintings, Canaletto’s original canvases have been copied along with their original dimensions to simulate his original works. With the addition of the same view from a Flickr image search, a painted “photographic” skin is laid over the painted copy. The similarity of the images: one based on the perspectival system of representation, the other on the mechanical apparatus of the camera, once layered creates its own “flicker” between images. This inquiry into the dual modes of representation is significant in order to ascertain the limits of both systems.
