Pae White | ArtDaily
Pae White, Phosphenes 1, 2011, ink and clay on wood, 17.75 x 17.75 inches, 45.1 x 45.1 cm.
By ArtDaily
The Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s (SBMA) exhibition Made by Hand/Born Digital features 12 artworks and 9 artists who use brushes, AI, paint, 3D printers, scissors, magazines printed on paper, digital looms, potter’s wheels, Photoshop, and Apple Photo. By continuing to craft ceramics, paintings, and textiles by hand and also using the latest digital tools, many of the artists in the exhibition blur a distinction between the handmade and digital. Collectively, these artists remind us that computers are tools—exquisitely complicated but still tools—made by and for humans.
They allow artists to work faster, experiment before committing precious time and materials, toss the dice of chance to see what AI might conjure, or easily produce minutely wrought labor-intensive details. Their art demonstrates that silicon-based intelligence and our carbon-based mammalian brains can and do work together as well as suggesting an alternative to inevitable digitization of everything. With a mixture of recent museum acquisitions and loans of artworks by Alex Heilbron, Taha Heydari, Yassi Mazandi, Justin Mortimer, Analia Saban, Ena Swansea, Sarah Rosalena, Joey Watson, and Pae White, this exhibition shows that the traditional mediums—painting, ceramics, and weaving—can incorporate the methods offered by digital technologies to erode a clean distinction between the digital and handmade. Perhaps, the biggest lesson is to ignore hype about the latest transformational gadget or app and, instead, pay attention to what artists are really doing with technology and see how they channel cutting edge tools to deal with the age-old struggle of giving concrete visual form to ideas and pictures inside their minds.