Helma Sawatzky
Much of my art practice is informed by a simultaneous enchantment with and concern for the increasing presence of the screen and myriad forms of digital mediation in daily life experiences. I am interested in how the digital interface affects and redirects the ways in which we interact with each other and with our environment and how we negotiate a parallel existence in both reality and virtuality. I currently work with the photographic medium in both its analog and digital incarnations as it embodies the threshold between reality and digital construct.
VIRTUALITIES
A while ago I decided that my time had come to take on the role of virtual tourist and embark on a Grand Tour of cyberspace in the hope of expanding my horizons and exposing myself to a firsthand experience of virtual worlds. In the spirit of a nineteenth century Grand Tour, I set out to behold all those virtual vistas, monuments and cabinets of curiosities as may be encountered in virtuality. My travels through one of today's self-proclaimed leading online worlds, Second Life, took place in the fall of 2008 from my home in Surrey BC, Canada. I went sightseeing in several of its virtual domains and photographed my screen from my embodied existence in real time and space similar to how I would approach my 'real life' holiday snapshots. The large C-prints produced from these negatives give presence to the 'woolly' RGB phosphors of my CRT monitor: the phosphor dots simultaneously deconstruct the image as a 'light show' and call up associations with a hand embroidered surface.
SCATTERPLOTS
Scatter Plots is a series of digital C-prints that continue on where German photographer Thomas Ruff's JPEG series left off. Whereas his work focuses on the compression processes that abstract the image information in a digital photograph, the Scatter Plots series stages its smallest unit, the pixel, as both medium and metaphor. I use pixelation to create moments of rupture within the image, moments which expose the 'nature' of digital photography pixels on a grid, moments which engage the capacity of the human mind to impute missing data, moments that activate the image as a façade signifying both our desire and the ephemeral experience of nature. The title Scatter Plots plays on the essence of the digital image as a grid of data points. The pixel traps many binary motions: it simultaneously constructs and deconstructs, it renders detail and abstracts image information, it represents 'reality' and conjures up illusions.
Construction Sites Phase II: The Phoenix Complex (ed. of 5)
53 in x 44 in
lightjet print mounted on aluminum Dibond
$3500
Construction sites embody society’s projections of myriad imagined futures—the pursuit of a ‘dream home,’ the wish to create a ‘shopper’s paradise,’ the need for a social housing project, or, in the case of Morgan Crossing, the desire to ‘live in the middle of everywhere.’ In this body of work I digitally reconstruct sites/sights that were photographed in small segments (100–200 digital photographs per image). This strangely distorted ‘unfolding’ of the landscape thus emerges as the space in which the image data collected ‘on site’ becomes the building material for an imaginary development that inhabits an uncanny borderland between fact and fiction.
Construction Sites Phase II: Morgan Crossing (ed. of 5)
28 in x 48 in
digital data construction: light jet mounted on aluminum Dibond
$2900
Construction sites embody society’s projections of myriad imagined futures—the pursuit of a ‘dream home,’ the wish to create a ‘shopper’s paradise,’ the need for a social housing project, or, in the case of Morgan Crossing, the desire to ‘live in the middle of everywhere.’
In this body of work I digitally reconstruct sites/sights that were photographed in small segments (100–200 digital photographs per image). This strangely distorted ‘unfolding’ of the landscape thus emerges as the space in which the image data collected ‘on site’ becomes the building material for an imaginary development that inhabits an uncanny borderland between fact and fiction.
Scatter Plots: False Creek (ed of 5)
36 in x 45 in
lightjet print mounted on aluminum Dibond
$3100 CDN
Scatter Plots:Yaletown (ed. of 5)
36 in x 45 in
lightjet print mounted on aluminum Dibond
$3100 CDN
Scatter Plots: Bear Creek Park (ed. of 5 )
30 in x 30 in
$2200 USD
inkjet print
mounted to 40" x 40" museum board
Scatter Plots: Morgan Creek (edition of 5)
30 in x 30 in
inkjet print
$2200 CDN
mounted to 40" x 40" museum board
Scatter Plots: Morning Frost (edition of 5)
30 in x 30 in
inkjet print
$2200 CDN
mounted to 40" x 40" museum board
Data Transfers: The Dream (edition of 5)
16 in x 24 in
inkjet print
$1050 CDN
Data Transfers: Olympia (edition of 5)
16 in x 24 in
inkjet print
$1050 CDN
Suspended Series - Untitled 1 (edition of 5)
18 in x 18 in
lightjet print
$1100 CDN
Suspended Series - Untitled 2 (edition of 5)
18 in x 18 in
lightjet print
$1100 CDN
Suspended Series - Untitled 4 (edition of 5)
18 in x 18 in
lightjet print
$1100 CDN
Suspended Series - Untitled 5 (edition of 5)
18 in x 18 in
lightjet print
$1100 CDN
Data Mulch Series - Untitled 3 (edition of 5)
48 in x 24 in
lightjet print
$2600 CDN
Data Mulch Series - Untitled 2 (edition of 5)
48 in x 24 in
lightjet print
$2600 CDN