Teleportraiture

Teleportraiture is a series of oil portraits of kickstarter donors, painted through videochat. Eighteen backers bought their portrait for a low introductory price, and 25 more are sitting for one of which they recieve an image. All will be exhibited at Space Womb in Long Island City May 18-31, 2012. There will be a catalog and poster for sale.

My portraits examine the intimacy generated during the interaction between painter and subject - the painting is artifact of a performance of relationship and conversation. In the past few years interacting remotely in this same facial, visual and vocal way has become commonplace. In videochat, we alter our faces from the way people look at computers to how they look at people. Rather than heightening anxiety, services like gchat and skype make us more used to watching non-performing faces. Models - donors above the posing threshold - might appear absent while still visible and posing, as they browse or work or watch something else on the same screen.

This examines the strange intimacy and charged emotions around communicating remotely by making the archaic oil portraiture tradition site-unspecific. The paintings evidence the intermediary camera and compression, generating artifact artifacts, and reflect their particular system of old and new technologies.