"Oscars Selfie" by Bryan Robertson

NFT Details:

1920 x 1074 pixels

300 DPI

Original Art Work

About the Artist:

Bryan Robertson

Bryan Robertson grew up in the inner city of St. Louis, Missouri, in the Midwest region of the United States. He was fortunate to study the Russian language in primary school and had the chance to visit and stay with a family in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. This experience in post-Soviet Ukraine began his interest in researching authoritarian social structures. Additionally, Robertson was introduced to a shared sense of humanity and a love for visual language while being welcomed into a community half of a world away and visiting an art school in Zhytomyr.

Besides these experiences, his grandparents' escape from the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia and Poland influenced his thinking about the world. Robertson says, "from a young age, I have been writing, painting, drawing, and experimenting with methods of communication that aim to understand the human experience mainly for myself. After going to graduate school, I began to think about communicating with a larger audience and the individual’s relationship to the whole. For me, we live in a New Media Age, a time where the image is more important than words, and that is why I am a visual artist."

Robertson holds an MFA in painting and drawing with distinction from the University of Washington, Seattle. He has received several university and non-profit grants to support his research and held solo exhibitions in commercial and non-profit spaces. He has presented at national conferences, including the College Art Association, Foundations in Art: Theory and Education, SECAC, and the New Media Caucus. His recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition of moving images at the CICA Museum in Seoul, South Korea, and experimental sound and video at the Long Island Museum of Contemporary Art. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of 2-D visual arts at Yavapai College in the mountains of central Arizona between Phoenix and the Grand Canyon.

Description:

What fascinates me most about the current state of imagery is its poor and dispossessed state. On the one hand, images today are a powerful method of communication, but on the other hand, a single image means less than it ever has. For this project, my research begins with the “Time 100 Greatest Photos” as a starting point to investigate a place where imagery can still obtain elite status and conjure an emotional response through cultural, historical, geographical, and epistemological contexts.

The Time 100 is a display of authority, a visceral reminder of who controls the levers of power, how they pull them, and whom it affects. Through a translation of these famous images into lyrical works of abstraction, through a fluid and deliberate mark-making and surface handling, my digital paintings expose the hidden energy of these photographs. By removing the visual connection to time and place, my work reinterprets and subverts the apparent significance of the original images. Ultimately, the translation of these images into works of beauty and meditation transcends their original meaning. The original story remains because the title remains; this asks whether the imagery or the words associated with the image are more important?

This work is available for collectors as a physical sublimation dye print on aluminum at the size of 42” x 23.5”

Website: Museum.io Collections on OpenSea