Brooke Adams

Fine Art - BA (Hons)

The word ‘image’ is pervasive. Images are not real. No image is, in itself, reality. Instead, images can only be considered as reflections of the real.

I see myself, first and foremost, as a painter. However, recently, I have come to understand my position as something else. I utilise painterly techniques to produce unique images, confronting the agency of the image and the role of the screen in contemporary existence. Painting the realities of the screen, where the screen acts as the facilitator for a displayed image to exist, solidifies my role as translator. These realities, consisting of reflection (of myself and my environment at the time of creation), the blue-toned solarisation when viewed against typical angles, the screen’s pixelated configuration, and the build-up of static dust on the screen’s surface, ultimately lead to the mutation of the original image.

Each of my paintings, described as ‘Screen Studies', reveal the tension of the screen in producing a solarised being, conflicted between its absence and presence. Therefore, my paintings have an uncertain position, stuck between being and not being. Expanding the scale of the screen onto canvas enhances the ambiguity of my paintings, pushing them into the realm of abstraction. In this way, my work confronts viewers, and as such, fundamentally questions our understanding of the power of an image and therefore, the nature of viewing, through the conditions of the digital screen, for their seemingly mutating quality.