014 321123

321123 by Kamilah Gill

I'm still working on what to say about this new direction I'm heading in... I'm trying to make the ephemeral more permanent so that we can examine it more closely. I also want to show what's happening right now, or just 5 days ago. Eventually that will be years ago. The sources for these images will have long since been forgotten and buried underneath trillions more images, but I will have preserved a few of them for posterity. Every second of every day, thousands more images from all over the world get uploaded to the internet. I'm selecting a few at random for their pleasing juxtaposition within a grid. I don't rearrange the images. This is the way that they appeared together on the site that I used.

Certain sectors of the art world keep declaring that painting is dead. It kind of is. Really, all "fine art" is on life support because it's competing with so many much flashier and sometimes more compelling media. Movies, video games, even animated GIFs, and billions upon billions of photos. So I'm portraying what I see: too much of everything. I prefer painting because it forces things to hold still. Sculpture might be acceptable as well. People want things to move and be interactive all the time, but I feel like there are already too many things to watch that take up lots of our limited time. Interaction might be okay on some level, and I hope to explore that more in future pieces.