Painting
Amy Smith
Amy Smith is an Irish artist who is interested in expanding painting through an interdisciplinary practise of combined materials and mixed media. She believes that painting can be pushed past traditional flat surface, pigment and representation and expand out into space and technology. She is currently focused on expanding painting through digital platforms.
Her current body of work began on Microsoft Paint (a simple raster graphics programme) and has since developed onto Procreate (a more advanced raster programme). Amy works a lot with Google Street View and household objects as the subject matter for her paintings. She often manipulates her reference images to inspire a hybrid result.
Since our world today is so digitally inclined and depends now more than ever on communication, Smith is currently working on a project that involves an exchange of information with the public through social media.
Concept:
The work navigates contemporary culture’s hunger for instant communication through digital platforms– opening up conversation around the responsibility of the artist as the maker of things. Post-internet conditions encourage a tension that reflects the way our species communicates. Amy asks the viewer to look closely and critically at the relationship between the digital and the natural world.
The social platform she uses shares millions of images and provides information ranging over so many topics, it is a way in which we can communicate, create, expose, and promote. By participating in an exchange of information with the virtual public and illustrating what they suggest to her, the artist is allowing them to reflect on their relationship between the natural and digital world. Inside and outside.