'Buck and Stream' and 'Five Star Jump.'
It feels important that it’s connected to a digital landscape. There’s something about this digitization—it almost felt like you were walking into the actual internet when you were entering your show. How did you end up coming up with the immersive element of it?
I think this is my most ambitious show in terms of the scale of the installation. I was interested in the idea of the viewer needing to experience it in person, what with Instagram and jpegs. People always say, 'Oh you need to see a painting in person,' but I also feel like with phones, now you really do get a sense of what the painting is like through this 4-inch screen in our pockets. I like the idea of the painting being so big that you walk into it and it surrounds you, which I think you were alluding to—it’s kind of like playing Grand Theft Auto, you’re no longer in our world, you’re in this digital world. So, in the case of the exhibition, you’re in this painted world, which references the digital world. I’m really interested in all sorts of popular culture and entertainment and I like to paint from that—I go to the movies a lot and I love seeing movies in IMAX because the screen is bigger and it feels like your in this tiny little seat that’s getting swallowed up by that rectangle. I’m wondering, can painting compete with an IMAX screen or 3-D movies or virtual reality? Or not compete, maybe, but how do I paint in a way that responds to other ways that images are being consumed now?
Have you worked with digital art? What is your opinion on it?
I haven’t, no. You know, I enjoy it, but I don’t know—it’s weird because I’m making these paintings from these digital worlds, but I don’t love spending a long time on a computer. I like playing video games and watching movies and stuff, but in terms of the making, you can imagine the paintings take a while to make. I guess I would just rather spend that time doing something physical with my hands—not that making works digitally can’t be physical, I just think, in the end, I’m finding ways to continue to make painting exciting for me.
There’s this idea of a car crash happening, or destruction—it almost felt kind of violent in a way.
It’s hard to make work about video games without being aware of violence. Some of the previous work I had done were paintings from early first-person shooter imagery, like Doom 2 or Wolfenstein 3D—early pixelated violence. That type of violence is different from violence in movies because you’re the one controlling it, which I think is different psychologically, the activity of it. Then the painting is not interactive, it’s a static image—but I guess paintings are always interactive, because viewers are interacting with it in some way.
In Grand Theft Auto, you’re constantly being chased by the police, whether it’s sideswiping a car on accident or hitting a pedestrian, or maybe you’re doing a mission that involves a violent act. I mean, it’s fun to do these things—they’re not the sort of thing you want to do in our world, but in that world, there are no ramifications for your actions. So, you can drive your car off a cliff and the car explodes and you die but you just wake up instantly at the hospital and do it all over again. There’s this kind of digital immortality that supersedes the violence, death and destruction. It’s just something that’s a game-ender, but just another chapter in the game. It’s not something you’d play with in the real world, but it’s something that you get to do in this virtual one.
It’s such an interesting impulse toward mayhem and chaos where it’s like weirdly fun. I always feel like it’s a specifically male thing for some reason—boys just love chaos and going crazy.
It’s funny because I like to drive my car fast in the real world, but I do it in a way that’s like, what’s the fastest I can drive without getting pulled over? Or if I do get pulled over it’s borderline ‘Can I get out of this?' versus like I said in the video game, there’s no negative—you can just wake up again and get in a shoot-out.