Senior Art Thesis Work
I am a net surfer. An explorer of the web. Jumping from hyperlink to hyperlink, traveling cyberspace. Before I understood anything about the world, I learned how the delicate ecosystem of the internet worked. It was inescapable. But what did any of it mean? What do all these terms even mean? Well, we just need to look at their offline counterparts. I don’t remember much of the early internet, when the dot com bubble was still growing, except for these terms that hark to a distant, now unrecognizable, original object. As someone who never existed in a world without the internet, my art reflects this post-internet pre-dot-com-crash era in which my generation was incubated. This installation started by thinking about what online experiences I wished to commemorate and honor through painting. My oil paintings are framed to be more intimate, with smaller details that invite the viewer to find a laugh. One common thread between all my memories was that people online were experimenting with how to bring the real world online and vice versa. People would mash up all their favorite songs and remix photos from movies, TV, art, space, and even themselves; their homepages would look like their homes, the mall, or planets orbiting with them in the center. These online materials used to look like physical objects since the internet is a physical place. I wanted to pay tribute to this historical moment when the physical and digital worlds were combining themselves with each other. I feel as though experiences on the internet mirroring the real world are why I found it so approachable as a child and am still affected by it today.