GALLERY LINKS
INTERVIEWS + FEATURES
Feature in Seattle Met
Interview with Brush Work Podcast
ARTIST STATEMENT
My paintings involve math and reflections on society. Through hand-written algorithms, I am able to transform any text document into colorful oil paintings. Working with a “seed image” of a figurative under-drawing, I run my algorithms across the image, sometimes being instructed to pull shapes from the drawing, other times covering it with vertical marks or flat spaces. The algorithm is written as a series of “if/then” statements that connect my abstract visual language to the direct language of a text document. One small moment in the drawing can cause a ripple effect of painted marks echoing off of and overlapping each other, sometimes more or less depending on the designated zones in the painting.
Each letter in the text equates to one brush stroke in the painting. As I complete the brush stroke, I mark it off with a dab of paint on the text document, which produces a secondary painting of the marked-up text which I call an “algorithm byproduct.” The individual brush strokes accumulate on the surface of the painting to result in a larger, cohesive image just like the letters of the text build a single idea once placed together in a certain order.
The texts I translate are specifically chosen to be ones that represent harm in our current society. I often focus on laws or legal documents since those are written accounts which explicitly state the priorities of society or what is accepted as civil. And yet these documents are filled with violent and exclusionary language, representing a status quo of objectification that is still embedded in our contemporary way of life. Through the act of transforming them into paintings, I can obscure, reorder and highlight the words that make up the text, disarming them and building something beautiful and empowered out of them.
BIO:
Ilana Zweschi is an artist working in Seattle, Washington. She attended Skidmore College, graduating summa cum laude in 2011, where she was an Art Major and a Mathematics Minor. In 2014 she earned a MFA in painting from the SUNY Albany and received the Departmental Thesis award for her oral defense. She is currently represented by Foster/White Gallery in Seattle and is a Visiting Associate Professor at Cornish College of the Arts. Zweschi has exhibited nationally, is part of the Meta, Microsoft, and Port of Seattle collections, and received the DASH artist grant for 2022. Notable group shows include: Tiger Strikes Asteroid in New York, Museum of Museums in Seattle, and Out of Sight: A Survey of Contemporary Art in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has been published in New American Paintings, a Youngspace interview, and featured on the opening page of the Culture section of the Seattle Met in 2020.
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