24/5/2001
Jeremy Blake
dot, London
Five years ago digital art barely existed but increasingly it has rapidly become the hot new thing and can no longer be ignored as a legitimate art form. Chemical Sundown is a new work by twenty-nine year old, California Arts graduate, Jeremy Blake. Blake's computerised paintings offer up a mysterious and luminous landscape quality blurring the boundaries between traditional painting and computer generated images.
Chemical Sundown, (February 2001)
Five years ago digital art barely existed but increasingly it has rapidly become the hot new thing and can no longer be ignored as a legitimate art form. Chemical Sundown is a new work by twenty-nine year old, California Arts graduate, Jeremy Blake. Blake's computerised paintings offer up a mysterious and luminous landscape quality blurring the boundaries between traditional painting and computer generated images.
Chemical Sundown is a time-based 'painting' that combines architectural and abstract imagery, inspired by the legendary optical effects of LA's polluted air. The piece begins with a graphic depiction of a horizon line that begins to radically change shape, indicating a landscape capable of liquifying without warning. Images appear which portray a glamorous modernist structure built on this land despite the inherent danger. This structure is equipped with sliding walls and large windows designed to let in natural light. The changing light, in combination with the smog, creates clouds of colour that range from beautiful to ominously artificial. Technically this work deliberately ignores certain restrictions on bright colours in the NTSC (spell out) colour system. Other raw elements are also consciously left visible. The intention is to enable something like the visual equivalent of the controlled distortion common in electronically produced music.
In one room of the film structure a film loop is shown embedded in a set of monitors. The footage (from the film Casino Royale) shows a woman in a pink gown, standing on a pink spinning bed, enjoying a shower of feathers swirling around her. This image of unapologetic hedonism is used here as a sexy, phantom presence.
An oval shape is repeated throughout the piece. This shape is meant to recall the sun, the lenses of sunglasses, and is arranged in groups of two that resemble the number eight. The eight shapes provide a visual link to an earlier and related series of works entitled Bungalow 8 which dealt with the glamour, decadence and ambience of Hollywood's mythic character.
Opening hours Monday - Friday 1 -6pm
dot, 4th Floor, 41/45 Beak Street, Soho, London W1F 9SB