"I’m trying to look forward from my own vantage point, because that seems like the most challenging and complex thing to do."
—Avery Singer

Untitled, 2015, quasi-satirically engages themes of digitization, projection, and reproduction as an avatar-portrait of Avery Singer’s autobiographical artist archetype. The work, which featured in the artist’s first European solo show at The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 2016, originates from the pivotal body of work that launched the artist’s career, exploring the concept of the self as an archetypical artist through depictions of blocky, computer-generated characters. 

 

Untitled features a human bust in Singer’s signature greyscale; its flat hair, folded like confetti paper, casts shadows on the face in lieu of eyes or mouth. A detail is drawn out in a magnification loupe from the right cheek, seeking an invisible blemish in a gesture that any frequent user of social media will be all too familiar with. The hyper-zoom reveals textures unseen: a perforated dermis, microscopic particles that cast long shadows, like fingers, reaching out to touch the viewer and confront them with the work’s un/reality. 

 

Singer’s use of black and white in this body of work stems from a combination of childhood experiences and rekindled inspiration. The daughter of two film projectionists (her father worked at the Museum of Modern Art), Singer spent her childhood weekends watching art films in black and white in the museum’s basement viewing room. However, it took until 2009, when Singer, as an art student, saw an exhibition of Albert Oehlen’s Computer Paintings at Skarstedt, New York, for the artist to connect film and technology to her painting practice. “I had not been interested in contemporary painting until I saw that show,” she recalled. “And I realized, oh, this medium is actually really powerful, if you use it right.”ⁱ

"If you’re going to make an original statement in painting, you also have to address its history… All artists, but especially painters, have to deal with the issue of art in the age of mechanical reproduction."
—Avery SingerSinger’s works from this period, Untitled included, ask, what is the role of art (or artist?) when images can be mass-produced by computers? Reflecting on the start of her career, Singer notes, “I had not seen paintings that employ 3-D modeling software as a means for image production, so I began to experiment with that.”ⁱⁱ She uses such software—the architectural mock-up tool called SketchUp was an early favorite—to build her blocky, greyscale compositions of mute, female-coded figures who “romantically inhabit” the “mystical corners” of early 20^th century art history.ⁱⁱⁱ The figures’ abject blankness satirizes nostalgia for an art world gone by, and her clunky computer renderings recall canonical art-historical tropes, such as the flowing hair of Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, 1485-1486, Uffizi Gallery, or the corkscrew curls of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s 17th century sculptures. More contemporary references abound, too, as Singer draws from Modernist portraiture conventions, and classic theoretical concepts of image and reproduction.

 

"Instead of treating computer graphics as a flattening tool, I thought of using them as an illusory one, as a potential way to generate an unfamiliar reality."
—Avery Singer

When building compositions like Untitled, Singer works backwards from Internet image sources, which she then runs through her digital modeling tools, and finally translates into acrylic on canvas.^iv In a way, her process is the inverse of the average person’s experience of using the Internet, where one’s online persona is built up, over time, from “real life” sources. For Singer, the “real life” thing, the physical painting, is the last object to come into being.

 

Untitled exists in a digitally-mediated space in which one can zoom into the surface of the skin, yet the basic features of the face remain stubbornly undefined. The contrast of micro-knowledge and macro-frustration in Untitled perhaps reflects the “process of banalization” that Singer cites as a product of modern society, specifically, in terms of hyper-monetized and hyper-online spaces, such as social media, which is the natural habitat of the 21^st century artist building their career.^v

 

Singer engages this digital landscape in both personal and universalized terms with Untitled. Her computer aesthetic creates the artistic space to explore the self as archetypical artist, both intimately tied to, and completely divorced from, the self as an individualized human being.

 

ⁱ Avery Singer, quoted in Jason Rosenfeld, “Avery Singer with Jason Rosenfeld,” The Brooklyn Rail, September 2021, online.
ⁱⁱ Avery Singer, quoted in Lauren Cornell, “Hyperreal, if You Like,” Flash Art, October 12, 2015, online.
ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid.
^iv “Hammer Projects: Avery Singer,” The Hammer Museum, October 2015, online. 
^v Avery Singer, quoted in Cornell.