April 19 to May 4, 2006

Member’s Wall exhibition

Derek Brueckner
Bruce Back Cartogram (6429 version #4)
Ink Jet Print of Photoshop Image on canvas
2006

Artist Statement

For the last two years my work has mainly involved the use of a digital camera to capture still images and to digitally manipulate the images in Photoshop, which are then printed on canvas or paper.

Each work entails a digital collage process of seamlessly joining numerous duplicated and mirrored fragments. In each work the fragments are sourced from the initial digital image. Each image progressively multiplies, divides, transforms, and grows, reflecting an organic process similar to cell division.

This digital process culminates into subject matter that has connotations of corporeal entities, aliens, mutation, morphing, rhizomes, fractals, patterns, or spectacle. The work also alludes to various systems of image production that are connected to popular culture, mass media, science fiction, and include art historical references of Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Pattern Painting and presentation formats of landscape and portraiture.

In the back of my mind during the digital manipulation process, acknowledgments of the body as a politically charged entity and other critical theories occur. Some imagery in my digital work evokes internal corporeal and microscopic journeys that are a possible metaphor for de-materialization and the internalizing of the technological into the body.
As presented in works such as Bruce Back Cartogram, there can also be an external journey referencing topographical surveillance in relation to the body.

The seamless collage of duplicated and mirrored fragments may also represent the ever-increasing seamless integration of Internet capabilities and other advanced wireless technologies. The unlimited ?Hyper-Real? or ?Hypermodern? cultural influences of these advanced technologies simultaneously blur, multiply and rupture different senses of time and space. However during the working process, these pluralities of theories and metaphorical thought are often eclipsed by the desires for formal explorations, corporeal obsessions and utopian aspirations to subvert the Photoshop program. In the end my priorities are placed on intuitive processes, formal play, and disruption of the program’s binary system of symmetry and predictability.

During the last six years I see all of my work as an assortment of hybrid versions between the technological and the physical. I consider the work to involve processes of a pictorial “Cybrid”. I am reinterpreting Peter Ander’s architectural theories of the Cybrid in relation to pictorial space. According to Anders, the Cybrid is an environment or artifact that incorporates both physical and cyberspaces?. He discusses that the Cybrid is the threshold connection between the physical and cyberspace.

During the last two years these prints on canvas or cybrid paintings have emphasized Photoshop manipulations. My future goals for the work include expanding variations of threshold connections by reintroducing paint, and possibly include silkscreening onto the digital print. It is my hope to reveal more unique combinations of painting, printmaking, photography and the digital.