NO IDEA
About the artist
Keaton Gershen-Lewis is an artist exploring image consumption within an attention-based visual economy. His artmaking is premised on the interstice between image generation and consumption. The qualities and properties of images and their consumption constitute a politics of engagement, producing expectations that govern value in imagery. Resolution is primary: the high-definition image is resolved in totality only when the image content is the partner to desire. However, it is essential to clarify that the low-definition image has just as much potential to become resolved. Resolution is not definition.
This politics polices the speed, content, quality, and form of imagery while simultaneously determining the barriers to access.
Keaton is interested in the cyclical production process of desire-based image consumption. Images today are much more readily converted to currency than at any other time. This indexes images to the financial economy very obviously, but it also creates a profusion of sub-sub genres of forms of production or rituals of consumption, none of which contain any institutional property. The methods of consumption then are as fadish as the imagery itself. A huge surplus of image types, forms, and definitions is necessary for images to perform this way. For the human user, a willing overexposure leads to an optical and emotional desensitivity that empowers the cycle. The extremity of shared content is barely noticed or is only equally as significant as the properties of the date or origination of any particular post.
The paintings seek to pause the cycle of visual consumption through the materiality of the painted mark, effectively freezing the process of repetition-consumption that drives the contemporary digital experience.
Keaton’s paintings are an examination of the contemporary cycles of imagery, emphasizing the focus on appropriated images of violence and sexuality, commonly encountered and reshared subjects throughout the digital space. Taking influence from J.G. Ballard’s reading of psychopathology and the mundanity of sex and violence in the media era, Keaton seeks to advance that perspective into an exploration of constant media exposure in the social media landscape.
Important links to the artist
http://mouchette.org/
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/
https://raccoonretail.com