Dylan Riley

My practice is rooted in an investigation of digital and painted images. It meditates on the interbred way in which contemporary images are produced and consumed through painting and error-prone processes of mechanical reproduction. As seeing is, for many, our confirmation sense (you have to see it to believe it) I search for the power structures and epistemological values within contemporary images, particularly representations of objects. My work explores how the meaning of objectivity has shifted over time and how images respond to that shift. Heavily relying on image making software, I first create compositions digitally before translating them to paint. I investigate how our inherited ideas of objectivity have impacted the design of image-generating software, and use two and three dimensional softwares in reflexive patterns to examine the implicit structure within these softwares. The unified visual language of image-making software masks the fallibility of their output representations, the subjectivity of the creator, and the values inherent within their aesthetic choices. By translating from digital to paint, I excavate this obfuscated subjectivity of the digital through the reintroduction of touch, time, and painting’s innate ability to foreground the maker.