Description

In this exhibition Brantford artist Paul Kneale examines the physical dimensions of digital imagery. Influenced by the histories of scanography and xerography, Kneale uses inexpensive flatbed scanners to produce large scale scanner paintings. His approach simultaneously breaks from the canon of Modernist abstraction while leading contemporary painting in new directions. 

Using an unpredictable and laborious process, Kneale builds layers of low and high-resolution scans with the machine’s lid open and nothing resting in the copy bed. What is captured by the scanner are traces of ambient light contained in the ether of the artist’s studio that, when gathered together, forge a complete image. 

These “impressions,” as he describes them, have found their way into previous works and will again be utilized in the future, signaling a recycling of visual archetypes into new compositions. Moreover, Kneale’s scanner paintings stretch the expanses of space-time by overlaying quick low-res scans over slow high-res scans so that particular moments and atmospheres are documented. Not only does this allow viewers to read Kneale’s work as paintings, scans, or photography, but it also opens their interpretation to a form of experimental cinema. 

Kneale questions how the Information Age and cyberspace have undermined and dehumanized intimate and collective relationships. To counteract this, his impressions are approached as layers of flesh that reintroduce human elements into the cold frame of the digital image.