painting with light
low glow grow
My Last Tree House
Dracula
Art Toronto v Stable Diffusion
V
Art Toronto is Canada’s foremost international art fair, which took place from October 26—29, 2023, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. As a frequent visitor to art fairs, I’ve made it a habit over several years to capture and share some artworks that catch my eye. After exploring DALL·E 2 potential for extrapolating visual likeness with 2022 Art Toronto captures, I decided to extend the experiment with Stable Diffusion and explore how various AI image-to-image extrapolations have evolved since then.
Practice over the previous year has informed my understanding that Stable Diffusion XL provided one of the more robust toolsets for iterating and tweaking parameters. The results, seen below, are example of the greater nuance of this year’s AIs. However, they also often reveal compromises or obfuscation surrounding tropes, subjects, and pattern recognition.
This gesture is made with great respect for the original artworks and artists. These extrapolations would not be possible without the foundational jumping-off points provided by their artistic creations. The connection between those original gestures and the potential for others to extrapolate from artistic vocabularies is a rapidly shifting realm.
2022, acrylic on canvas. Presented by Art Canada Institute.
oil on linen 49 × 34 in. Presented by Bau-Xi Gallery.
(2×) 120 × 160 cm
Detroit Lemon Tea & untitled greens
Some spry spritz and rise from hot plasma and cold ocean swells. Just a taste. Lemon Tea and untitled greens are paired together here as light box imagery and conceptual bridges. These are a likening to worlds between worlds and of our presence and the gestures we make being an inseparable aspect of the places we visit.
untitled
Willow Checker
There was a willow that hung over the farmhouse that I grew up in, but it was cut down when I was still quite small. Despite knowing its stump well I think a part of me is still looking for that tree.
♫ Playlist
Isles
Checker Fluid
Miami Pairs Pop-up
When does a soul become dyed with the color of its thoughts? These large images both face themselves and face away. Reaching and spiraling both inward and upward, they are poised and revealed, always re-centering on some in-between space and embracing a warmth of details to call their own.
Untitled Pairs and Blue Parrots are exhibited alongside a selection of works by Saimaiyu Akesuk, curated by NAMARA for the Canada Goose Miami Pop-up.
Beijing 作 为一只 鸟 As a Bird
Taikoo Li Sanlitun, Beijing. Two figures, two artists, Saimaiyu Akesuk’s Rippling Birds and Sparkling Bird are here intersected by Alex Fischer.
Saimaiyu’s confident drawings with bold and dynamic simplicity are rendered with soft tenderness and often a touch of whimsy. Alex’s fashioning of Saimaiyu’s characters into models here amplifies their presence.
A presence of standing being sensitive to the waves and stars. A proud character.
Dublin Portal
Shadow Integration as a delicate digital folding. The world swirls around the conscious persona. But here we are, gazing into the gray, not in it but with it. Witnessing the surplus of reality that resists.
Commissioned as a part of the NAMARA curated Canada Goose art collection in Dublin, Ireland along with a custom Fischer assisted textiles of original artworks by Ningiukulu Teeve and Quvianaqtuk Pudlate as well as a selection of other drawings and prints by Kinngait artists.
Photo by Joas Souza
Photo by Joas Souza
Photo by Joas Souza
Photo by Joas Souza
Photo by Joas Souza
Photo by Joas Souza
Broken Pattern
Gwynplaine has a permanent smile carved on his face by the King
Playground AI assisted
Cardboard Ideas
Cardboard Ideas, Playground AI assisted
untitled 230129
The darkness was a living thing a pulsing breathing entity that seemed to be closing in on them
The darkness was a living thing a pulsing breathing entity that seemed to be closing in on them
Xenomorph
Xenomorph
Trio of plants
Trio of plants
untitled 230106
Five Alarm Studio Fire
Five Alarm Studio Fire
Art Toronto v DALL·E 2
Artworks captured at the 2022 edition
Image-to-image extrapolations 2022-10-29
75 × 65 in. Presented by Bradley Ertaskiran
23 × 30 in, presented by Feheley Fine Arts
Brian Rideout, American Collection Painting 55 (Bacon), 2022 oil on canvas 24 x 24 in. Presented by MKG127
ART SHOW @ NAMARA projects
A curated exhibition at the NAMARA Projects space, that took place October 22, 2022 — January 6, 2023. The works were selected from across several bodies of work and informed by the following tenets:
Practice here involves a persistent discovery and wielding of new creative tools, strategies, and ideas.
An aim to reveal the hybrid and fluid nature of things.
This body is mine but I am not my body.
Art is an unlikely extension of nature.
Assistance as a partnership.
Perspectivism reigns.
I have been witnessing Alex Fischer’s practice throughout their professional career. Technology has always been instrumental to the artist’s process and its impact is evident in the content of resulting printed works. Fischer addresses narratives around technological production, online personhood, and digital authorship. These remain significant to the artist’s practice and hold new consequence in the age of tokenized digital art.
Equally important are the tethers Fischer maintains to traditional art and in particular, conventions of painting. The artist employs myriad digital brushstrokes. Textures, palettes and implied hand are sampled from historical and contemporary works alike. Fischer amalgamates manifold style, resulting in one that is undeniably their own. The artist’s oeuvre is in tension with itself. Seemingly unwilling to give in to digital tropes, visual language is neither a challenge nor concession to prevailing digital modes of artmaking.
Unlike previous series, collections or exhibitions, Art Show brings The Body to the fore. Dynamism characterizes youthful bodies, absorbed into their surroundings–or maybe not. Perhaps the figures are in fact emerging from their conditions. Are these scenes of struggle or performance? Are these avatars labouring within the digital space in which they were conceived–Seeking to separate, or at least to distinguish form from matter?
Fischer does not provide an answer. They embrace the “hybrid and fluid nature of things.” The artist plays with convention and embraces uncertainty. They point to the humanity in digital space without succumbing to it. Even in the more abstract compositions, the audience recognizes certain reflections: Eyes, limbs, movement, and flesh are present but more or less entwined with place.
Disentangling is work for the viewer.
Natalie MacNamara, Principal & Creative Director, NAMARA
