Fine Arts Alum Vickie Vainionpää's (BA '15) latest paintings can be seen in the new show, Gaze Paintings, at Olga Korper Gallery from March 16 - April 27, 2024. The opening reception March 16, 2 - 5 pm.
What does it mean to look at a painting? This is the central question explored by Vickie Vainionpää in her latest body of work, Gaze Paintings, in which she reflects on the historical implications of the gaze. Vainionpää has developed a distinct visual language of forms that are recognizably organic and bodily while simultaneously digital and abstract, generated first through custom-built 3D modeling software and finally rendered in oil paint on canvas. For the works in Gaze Paintings, Vainionpää has added an additional step to her generative process: using herself as the tool, and her own gaze as the subject as she engaged with canonical works of art.
While visiting museum collections during a residency in London, Vainionpää wore eye-tracking glasses to record her visual movements while looking at paintings by Rubens, Tintoretto, Bronzino, and more. The artist was specific in her choices, selecting paintings seemingly made for the male gaze, usually ones that featured a central female nude. Pushing up against the male gaze with a clinical approach to the female gaze, the journey her eyes made over each painting was mapped as data points in 3D space, which were then used to generate the images of her signature tubular forms.
Data collected in person using Pupil Labs Neon Module at The National Gallery, while the artist was on residence in London, UK. Source: Peter Paul Rubens, Samson and Delilah, 1610
In these finished paintings, hidden within some of those curling forms are the suggestions of faces – points of fixation of the gaze – looking back at the viewer and alluding to, though not fully revealing, the relationship between the abstract paintings and their original source material. Vainionpää’s interest in cyborgism – the relationship of interdependence between humans and the augmenting technological devices that they use – reaches new ambition as the artist herself becomes a cyborg for her art.
In her newest two paintings from the Gaze Paintings 2.0 series, Vainionpää extended the invitation to others to take part in her generative cyborgian experiment. In the end she compiled the active gaze of over one hundred viewers into two paintings. Their collective acts of looking were analyzed as data points and mapped into frenetic and dynamic compositions that become an interconnected tangle. Their titles, The Painter’s Studio and The Dream, reference specific paintings that the viewers looked at, but also suggest more ambiguous readings – perhaps it could have been an entire painter’s studio that viewers’ eyes darted around, rather than simply a painting of one.
In Vainionpää’s work, representation and abstraction are one and the same, her paintings are at once the representation of a physical encounter with works of art, and at the same time an abstraction of that encounter into a digital image. Uniting physical and digital processes, the Gaze Paintings circumvent the much more sinister vibe of tracking and surveillance associated with these algorithms and technologies and replaces them with colourful optimism and joyful kinetic energy rendered in paint.
Essay by Alex Feim
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About the Artist
Vickie Vainionpää is known for using code as a medium to create generative oil paintings that celebrate the infinite relationship between diameter, curve, and entanglement. Her softly textured, organic shapes fold and twist to create biomorphic forms simultaneously non-representational and yet familiar. Using data from various sources, Vainionpää began with an investigation in randomness manifesting abstraction, but more recently her research has included eye-tracking software to analyze the gaze as it relates to historical works of art. In her Gaze Paintings series, Vainionpää’s maps the process of looking, transforming the notion of the gaze into a literal representation of the act of viewership manifested in her signature curvilinear forms. With their cool fleshy tones and plush texture, the paintings have a high-energy exuberance, a ’techno-optimism’ that lends itself to the artistic process of blending digital code with the physicality of paint and canvas.
Vainionpää has participated in group shows at The X Museum, Beijing, China and The Margulies Warehouse, Miami, USA. Recent solo exhibitions include Metamorphoses at the historic site of The Museo Belvedere di San Leucio, CE, Italy; Software at The Hole, New York, USA as well as a solo presentation at NADA Miami, USA. She is represented by Olga Korper Gallery.
Gaze Paintings
March 16 - April 27
Opening Reception March 16, 2 - 5 pm
Olga Korper Gallery, 17 Morrow Ave, Toronto.