Jerimiah Chechik
Artist’s Statement, 2023
In his book New Media in Late 20th-Century Art, Michael Rush notes: " In painting or sculpture, it is the concepts and uses of materials that change in the art. With technology-based art, the medium itself radically changes when the technology changes. The excitement . . . in being able to capture movement . . . is now replaced by an enthusiasm for altering reality, for making the real illusory."
Over the years we have become somewhat hard-wired to regard photographs as truthful and real. As photography distanced itself from the aesthetic of painting, it embraced "objective" interpretation of the world as a factual representation. No matter that the depiction of Ansel Adam's Moon and Half Dome (1960) or Cartier Bresson's leaping man in Place de l'Europe Gare Saint Lazare (1932) are tonally abstract and black and white. Compare these "realistic" images with a Rembrandt painting such as Self Portrait with Beret and Turned up Collar (1659). The Rembrandt seems much more objective, more colorfully realistic, than the photographs, which use only form plus white, grey, and black tones to achieve their effect. And yet, it is the photographs that claim to present the objective true moment.
In pushing the conversation of the photographic form forward, photography finds itself at a similar crossroads as painting did in the 1940s, when it gave rise to Abstract Expressionism. A camera is no longer a required tool. We can create photographs rather than take photographs. Photography is no longer exclusively the medium of witness, “objectively” recording a perceived reality. Scientific investigation, from the atomic to the planetary, is in many ways the purview of the photographic. We have come to believe that nothing is more objective than the microscopic or telescopic image.
Currently, we find ourselves at a cultural crossroads, a so called "post-truth" reality where it is not enough to believe our senses, and what is objectively real is often in dispute. This tension between mind and eye creates a new perception—one which causes us to question our own subjectivity. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, between subjective and objective, between truth and illusion, I inhabit this median zone that lies between. I explore ways of creating that deepen the emotional reaction to the work, using history, memory, and fiction fused in a what appears to be a scientific method and its photographic record.
While the eye seeks to believe that these images are a methodical and clinical record, the instinct revolts, as we feel the pull of an unnatural dreamscape. If creativity is based on remixing existing elements into new combinations, then all art is to some degree derivative. With diffusion models, large and small language models, the empathetic and conscious artist can collaborate with the supreme intelligence of the machine and take us to a familiar “unknown.”
Art cannot be created or destroyed, only remixed. We borrow what we like and build on it. This cultural exchange insures that art, technology, and culture will continue to evolve. My work is intended to transport the viewer through a kind of false memory to a different time and place, where everything feels familiar, real, and emotionally tinged.
“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.” —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
*Art on cover: Lippershay 1608 Study 2, 2020