Join us for Vickie Vainionpää’s first major solo exhibition in Canada, “Gaze Paintings” opens Saturday March 16th from 2-5pm.

What does it mean to look at a painting? This is the central question explored in Vickie Vainionpää latest body of work, Gaze Paintings, in which she considers the historical implications of the gaze within painting. Vainionpää has developed a distinct visual language of forms that are abstract yet bodily, which are generated through custom built 3D modeling software before being painted in oil on canvas. For the works in Gaze Paintings, Vainionpää adds an additional step to her generative process, which begins with her own embodied gaze and herself as a subject apprehending canonical works of art.

While visiting museum collections during a residency in London, Vainionpää wore eye tracking glasses to record her eye movements while looking at paintings by Rubens, Tintoretto, and Bronzino, among others. Works that were chosen were ones which seemed to exist specifically for the male gaze or that featured a central female nude, with an interest in challenging the directionality of the gaze. Her gaze was mapped as data points in 3D space, which she then used to generate images of her signature tubular forms.

Within some of those 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 paintings and their source material. Her interest in cyborgism – the relationship of interdependence between humans and the augmenting technological devices that they use – reaches new ambition as she herself becomes a cyborg.

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, and compiled the gazes from over 100 viewers on 2 paintings. Their collective gazes were analyzed as data points, and mapped into energetic and dynamic compositions that become an interconnected abstract tangle. Their titles, The Painter’s Studio and The Dream reference specific paintings that the viewers looked at, yet also suggest more ambiguous readings – perhaps it could have been a painter’s studio that viewers’ eyes darted around, rather than a painting of one.

Uniting physical and digital processes, the gaze paintings suggest an optimistic outlook on the creative possibilities of algorithms and technologies which tend to have more sinister associations of tracking and surveillance. Vainionpää works in a mode in which representation and abstraction are one and the same – the gaze paintings are the representation of a physical encounter with works of art, yet at the same time the abstraction of that encounter into a digital and subsequently painted image.

Written by Alex Feim