Digital Dreams and a Pinch of Dust

Digital Dreams and a Pinch of Dust is a collection of 14 digital paintings created May to Feb 2021 during stay-at-home orders in Toronto. The collection illustrates transitions from isolated individuation to celebrating shared food and kisses at an agape meal and then arriving at the graveyard. This meal originated in the early Christian church to strengthen the bonds of affection and fellowship. Many of the figures are animated with psychic​ glowing or radiating marks, proceeding confidently from my previous painting series. The subjects sit in imaginative situ, perhaps at a table, a sauna, on a carpet. The backgrounds are abundantly decorated with leaf stamps and textures. The skin is traced with airbrushing, perfect for modeling volume and defining features using water-washes, charcoals, and brightness brushes. The Procreate app simulates multi-media painting and illustration techniques. All the work demonstrates an insatiable curiouslity at the app's ability to translate mixed media. I am especially motivated to imitate media I can't access due to my limited home-based studio, like painting on silk or pulling marble paper. The gestures seen in the mark-making are defined as stroke properties, rendering, and dynamics. Most of the early works simply render the default settings, but occasionally I use purchased brush sets (notable is the brush set brow and lashes). The differences in digital painting versus a material studio practice are numerable. The digital painting attempts to coalesce material rules unbounded by material effects. Physics are transcended, here, oil and water mix and wet and dry are the same. Bonus, there are no fumes and I am not pouring plastic down the drain. Plus, no cloth will spontaneously combust. But, no mark catches the light. My good material understanding of painting makes the simulation app a natural extension of my years-long practice. Importantly, I love the zero clean-up application making creating outstandingly portable. The collection activates curiosities about the function and ontology of digital paintings. Where I am usually very strict about what processes or representations are considered painting, I'm open to expanding its definitions. Is this collection a series of paintings? Or are these drawings? Are they prints or maybe illustrations? I just don't know what box to check when applying to art fairs with this work. With the collection unbounded by material effects it is typically encountered on screens like social media or digital publications.

Works from Digital Dreams and a Pinch of Dust are available as a 17" x 24" print for $225 unframed (or any size, or framed). 

Plant Documentary with Distant Worships

"Plant Documentary with Distant Worships” offers portraits of vessels, persons, and picnic benches entangled with their park environments; combining ecology and portrait. My process is lead by an ineffable curiosity that animates my exploration of tonal range and dis/trans-figuration. The collection celebrates embodiment and volume, and is held together with gesture, speed, and tacit knowledge. Here, dichotomies (obj/subj, fore/background, human/nature) argue for balance and harmony. The work gallops with quick gestural brush strokes on thirsty masonite, refusing the dull and calculated.

I was out of paint and moved forward with a limited palette (phthaloblue, dry yellow, black). After a renoviction from my studio last spring, I had to start working with acrylic. This required ample experimentation for me to assume its behaviour, this collection is that work. The fast drying time of acrylic directly impacts the speed of application. I work on a 32 square foot carpet, therefore the scale of all these works are suitable for home display. I only had a small, and now exhausted collection of photographs to reference for images. I can't listen to podcasts when I work, I need to empty upon the canvas; painting is a drum.

My internal motivation is simple; I paint because it provides sensual and intellectual pleasure. This work is an important material demonstration exploring how the symbols of humanity coalesce within abundant nature. It is also an insignia of my relentless capacity to show up at the easel. I hope it inspires your own creative commitment.

Chakras For Engineers 

Technology is mimesis, the capability of imitating the human condition with such exactitude that it has become synonymous with the skin, the flesh, the vital organs of human bodies. Artificial life becomes the performance of real life. Distinguishing between skin and machine, thus becomes difficult. ~Jaimie Smith-Windsor, The Cyborg Mother (2004) 
#ChakrasForEngineers
I paint cyber nudes to understand our black-boxed living experience of flesh. This series investigates our embodied engagement with technology while demonstrating our capacity for mimesis, confluence, intersectionality, and mutation. I aim to render technological artifacts as conscious and persuasive. Each painting asks the audience to imagine what the tech is proxy for; does the device represent community, task, tool, prosthetic, or property? The series supports the mystification of technological artifacts, while simultaneously encourages intimate investigation. #CharkasForEngineers envisions a desirable and democratic future where society and technology are closely entwined to liberate all people.  
#ChakrasForEngineers
I make oil paintings on canvas of people, often nude, posing with their technological devices in their private dwelling. This work was developed from a photoshoot exploring traditional portrait lighting and posing. The photos were then manipulated with Photoshop to accentuate visualized engagement between the model and the technological devices present. The oil painting is traditionally executed with layers of glazes and gestural impasto mark making accentuating curves of the figure. I aim to synthesize digital technologies and traditional methods to develop paintings that talk about our contemporary engagements with technology.
 
The paint metaphorically resembles intra-active phenomena engendering boundaries as if to add a layer of skin. I paint the skin of people; I paint their face. The work also relates to communication, data surveillance, and information as chakra theory. I focus on the relationship the model has with the tech, and not the relationship the viewer has with the tech. I am trying to accomplish a visual telling of becoming through portraiture.
 
I want people to mimic the colourful gestural motif of engagement represented between themselves and their technology. I want the audience to consider ways they interact with their devices, as props for psychic entanglement - I want people to meditate with their phones, laptops, etc.  Our data is intrinsically woven within us, we must learn to value its place in our autobiographical histories, we must not have shame about our data, we must learn to protect it, to offer our data privacy, and dignity.
 
Artistic influence in my life comes from the library and Instagram. I follow a couple hundred curators, portrait, and contemporary painters. I read amateur photography books and copy their poses. I value multiplicity in perspective and form. I enjoy gestural paint strokes and smooth gradients that juxtapose one another. I like paintings of faces that explore the background or alternative plains as interconnected with the representation of a person; so, I like blurry lines. Impressionism. Fauvists. Through art history, the gaze has motivated criticism about purposes of nude paintings. It would be amiss not to acknowledge the linage of history in nude portraiture, from life drawing to pornography. I aim to circumvent an oppressive gaze on the models through conversations about consent and ownership, and I don’t dominate my subjects through my body language; I don’t straddle my models or photograph looking down my nose (unless, they say it’s ok).
 
Technological relationships are intimate; they are engendered to us – apart of our individuated body.  We can view the relationship between the model and the tech as binary (caveat, prosthetic…) or consider how these technologies function as proxy for others. It’s important to have images of femmes entangling with technology; inspiring change to the typical STEAM gender demographics of enrolled students, entrepreneurs, and tech industries.
 
In the future, I want to see femme folks safe in their skin.
Streamautomata 
Theresa Slater’s Streamautomata Summer 2018 collection is a series of 30 18” x 24” abstracted oil meditations on 140lbs paper. Her process described as “stream-automata,” draws from theological and Surrealist methodologies. These oil paintings explore movement and gesture as modes of touch, asking how touch affects form or figure, and investigating how paint film simulates skin. This collection contrasts her figurative practice, here, she resists the objectification of bodies by excluding the strict delineation of representation. 
Fauvesque Exploration in Portraiture​
The series key motivation was to increase production after two years of not painting. I had started working on the kitchen table with gouache on paper, doing colour field washes and amped up to signing a rental lease for a studio. I experienced a profound healing when I committed to continuing my artistic practice. These are studies, not for a larger work but in having a studio as part of ones life. Additionally, I wanted to develop new work that could financial contribute to my life. Now, I have examples to help solicit portrait commissions. 

What other than portraiture is there to paint? I see trends in today’s portraiture that caricaturize's and exaggerates sitters with “multiplicity.” I see a lot of large scale biomorphic paintings of skin who's zoomed flesh is punctured with tattoos and hair. In my series, skin is considered tangible. The handling of the oil paint medium expounds flesh with all its hidden layers in excess.  

People get portraits done for remembrance and due to affection. Where they were traditionally motivated by prosperity to mark social status, here, friendship is celebrated between the sitter and painter. These images represent impactful relationships in my artistic life. These people are teachers, artists, and writers. Choosing photographic reference over life-sitting is entirely practical; I invite sitters to be photographed in my studio under two borrowed flood lights.

The criteria for a successful portrait, for me, is to have the sitter recognize themselves. I have accomplished illustrating a kind of mannerism for each sitter. For example, Shantel says that the portrait represents what she is doing in her painting studio. And Laura assures me the portrait is unbecoming to her esteem, yet affirms the likeness is undeniable.

The work is garishly colourful with a basic representationalist intent. I want them to be realistic, but, I always taint my palette by colour. I have treated the body and face differently. The focus is on the individual expression and housing of being that occurs behind a face. Most figures sit squarely as a conventional three quarter bust. The body is recognized in gesture like subtle adjustments, here, the motion capture points are draped in fabric. The figures float often lacking situ, though some are seated in a decorative chair. The force of being clothed in skin is considered as shapes represent coherent fields of mattering. 
"...optical pleasure when reduced to near nothingness promotes an infinite contemplation of infinity." Lyotard citing Kant in The Sublime and The Avant Garde, 1985

For a curtailed look at previous work, please see the links below:

FemBox Game Console

This collaborative project between Nina Belojevic and Theresa Slater is called FemBox. This video specifically looks at the Processing programming aspect of the work. We became inspired to make a collaborative piece while being co-participants in a DHSI intensive: “Feminist Digital Humanities: Theoretical, Social, and Material Engagements around Making and Breaking Computational Media” (Lead by Elizabeth Losh and Jacque Wernimont, 2014.)

We developed a physical console “black-box” stuffed with IR activated neopixels and wires to create unique shadows. The interactive console used an IR sensor, buttons and two dials (x and y axis) to interact with five individual Processing sketches complied into one program. It ran and it was a hit.

Special thank you to the guidance of Limbic Media.

This work was exhibited at Lux et Voluptas: Interactive Lighting Exhibition, Limbic Media, Victoria, BC on Aug 15, 2014
For more documentation: ninabelojevic.wordpress.com/portfolio/fembox/
For documentation of the Interactive Lighting Exhibition- Lux et Voluptas: vimeo.com/108299413