Michelle Eskola creates images that explore abstraction, the formation and disintegration of form within contemporary digital culture. These images are created as series of artworks that include drawings, paintings and digital prints. They are moments captured as part of a larger, continual processes of making, of layering, editing, printing, cropping and rearranging forms in paint, photoshop and prints. The artworks seep through this process to develop complex, intense visual fields. Yet this making process is not immediately noticeable to us as viewers, it reveals itself slowly on closer inspection across series of works that rhythmically repeat particular textures, colors and shapes. These fields of indefinite, shifting spaces are difficult to describe yet so pleasurable to view, they float as spatial diffusions of mood.
In the past few years there has been a resurgence of interest in contemporary abstract painting. Some exhibitions have suggested this interest is a reaction against technology, that it reflects a longing for objects in a digital world. In light of this idea, Eskola’s artworks are interesting for their cross-media experimentation of abstract forms. They explore image manipulation in the present era, a time in which the viral circulation of screen-based images and free filter applications have shifted the idea of the image and processes of making images. This exploration is driven by a dialogue with pigment and error and chance on real surfaces and objects, a dialogue at the heart of abstraction.
Text by Danielle Clej
EXHIBITION OPENING | FRIDAY 17 OCTOBER 6 – 9 PM
