Painted views from the Panopticon
|
William Betts's intriguing paintings View from the Panopticon will be exhibited April 13 - May 25, 2007 at the Richard Levy Gallery, in Albuquerque (New Mexico.)
The series of the paintings is inspired of course by the current rise in surveillance practice. They also make a step back in time by referring to Michel Foucault's essay Discipline & Punish and to the Panopticon, a proposal for a circular prison with an unseen guard watching from a center tower, designed by late XVIIIth century philosopher Jeremy Bentham. What makes his work unique is not the content but the technique. Betts' paintings both reinvigorates the traditional art discipline and draws on his mastering of software technology.
Using and adjusting staged and found surveillance images as the source for his work, Betts' works invite the viewer to draw on their own experiences, imagination, and anxieties to provide the interpretation. Via re-title. |
The artist used advanced computer controlled linear motion technology and a custom-designed software system to apply thousands of drips of paint with robot like precision. The individual drips of high gloss acrylic paint catch the light and give each drip its own dimensionality and further mimic video. In addition, Betts developed a color palette based on RGB additive component video to create ‘black and white’ images using only colored paint. A typical painting has between 30,000 and 40,000 individually applied drips of paint.
Leave a comment |
|
This is such a gimmick.
I almost pulled my hair out while reading this, as I'm in the middle of building a computer controlled painting machine myself, and someone else beat me to it.
great images. I hope I get a chance to see them in person one day.
This is pretty cool. I like the fact that it uses pointillist reference to combine RGB, camera's and the eye.
Hmm, gimmicky maybe, but the result is not as pretentious and irritating as most 'technical' art is. I like it.