Claudia Hart’s Digital Combines reinterpret the art historical trope of memento mori as a means to contemplate the passage of time and cultural decay. In a nod to Robert Rauschenberg’s term for expanded painting that combined sculptural and painted elements together in one work, Hart combines a physical work with its digital simulation to create a single conceptual piece. Each painting in the series is paired with an image file that acts as a carrier of the Combine’s metadata. Hart’s Digital Combines are an assessment of our current moment, asserting a new version of authenticity: painting for the age of the computer. Hart’s Combines comment on the “non fungible” nature of the NFT. In what has been called a “flirtatious simulation of forgery,” she uses computer modeling to render copyright protected works by Modernist patriarchs—Picasso, Matisse, and Morandi—in a parallel symbolic space. Meticulously composed by hand, using custom software, and reinterpreted with her own attention to color, light, and surface, we understand these works as dreamlike and disembodied, intermingling the physical world with an imaginary VR game space. Each unique work is generated from a JPEG, created with a computer-driven airbrush machine, using archival pigments on rare hardwood panels. As appropriations themselves, these works toy with the issues of copyright that date their origins to the Modernist response to photography.

Courtesy of the artist and bitforms gallery.

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