Facade

project

May 2018—May 2018

With all its ostentatious wholeness, the nude body remains silent; secret gestures, movements, expressions, habits and desires are hidden. The painting is the territory of the artist and the nude body represented becomes disconnected from the person within. It dissolves into the a landscape, which the painter chooses to map.

This map may be decorative or carry meaning but it acts purely on the surface. At the core of this dilemma, we become aware of the inherent contradiction of representation. Nudity is about actual, and potential, and about the desire to surrender yourself to the endless tangible dynamic in between. Who chooses what is revealed and what to hide?

In this work, we use a machine intelligence to interpret the surface of the body. The artificial network has learned from satellite imagery of Lithuania and it’s landscape. It scans a nude model  and dreams it’s own maps in real time. The maps are projected onto the model, imposing them back onto the surface. We wish to make tangible the choice of what is to be found or to be hidden? And we wish to ask, do we really have to choose?