Real-Life Digital Sculptures Are More Than They Appear

Artie Vierkant is a 26-year-old artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Not quite classified as a digital or new media artist, Vierkant’s work falls somewhere between the two with a bit of art theory and over-enthused, first-time Photoshop user gusto sprinkled into the mix. Through his widely-circulated theoretical essays and unconventional artistic practice, Vierkant’s main form of art comes from the dialog he evokes through his images and the alterations he makes to them.

The way that the internet changes the process of art making and consumption is one of the driving factors in Vierkant’s work. Breaking the wall between physical and digital in regards to art practice is where his ongoing series, Image Objects finds its significance. The series is composed of digital files that he renders as UV prints and machine-cuts to fit on 3D cintra sculptures—but there’s more to it than just the physical objects that one would view in a gallery. The series has another portion to it that lives in, you guessed it, the internet.

Photos of the sculptures on his website are distorted by random blurs, burning and dodging, lens flares, watermarks, and other superfluous effects. Vierkant deliberately depreciates images of his art as a part of the underlying critique of his work.

In his artist statement Vierkant says, “the viewer’s experience becomes split between the physical encounter in a gallery setting and the countless variations of the objects circulated in prints, publications, and on the Internet. The documentation becomes a separate work in itself, incorporating elements of collage, techniques commonly used in professional image retouching, aestheticized digital watermarks, and more.”

Vierkant searches to examine the void between an art object and its representation. The routes and networks by which visual art is spread online shows how intensely images get distorted or misrepresented through their online presence. His work pinpoints the negotiation artists make between gallery and online space. In the end, Vierkant’s work is meant to bring to light that idea that we are really just looking, but not seeing.

A deeper understanding about Artie Vierkant’s theory can be found in in his 2010 essay, “The Image Object Post Internet.”

Images courtesy of artievierkant.com and Brian Droitcour.

@embovoy