BONNIE MAYGARDEN

Jonathan Ferrara Gallery is proud to announce Desert of the Real, new paintings by artist Bonnie Maygarden.  The exhibition will be on view from 2 June through 31 July 2014 with an opening reception on Saturday, 7 June from 6-9pm. For her debut solo exhibition at the gallery, Maygarden explores modern society’s relationship with the contemporary image. As a painter, she has long been absorbed by traditional means of artistic creation. However, Maygarden’s new body of work responds to the immersion of the digital experience and the consequential shift in how one perceives and experiences images; unique, handmade objects have been replaced by digital images that are ever accessible, infinitely replicated, intangible and disposable. Through painting, Maygarden’s unique works possess an abstract illusionistic quality, confounding the viewer with a seemingly computer-generated aesthetic.

Maygarden says of this new body of work . . . We experience so much of our new reality through the glow of the digital screen, and in 1983, French theorist Jean Baudrillard was quick to underline this phenomenon in its primeval stages. In Simulations he states, “It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” Baudrillard predicted that the simulations of reality created by our culture will become more real to us than reality itself, and furthermore he believed our culture would become a “desert of the real”. Through my work, I am interested in uprooting our expectations and perceptions about technology-based images by creating handmade works that feel as though they were produced though the aid of technology. This shift from screen to reality creates an awareness of the lack of unique physical presence that we have come to expect in our culture.   

By taking nontraditional approaches to painting I can reference the history of painting as well as the aesthetic of our present culture. Like the digital screen, a pictorial space is created in my paintings that is simultaneously rendered and definitively flat. The crumple imagery is both a direct reference to the disposable nature of contemporary images, as well as a play on the trompe l'oeil found in traditional painting and photography. Light and color function as a way to describe nonexistent form as well as alluding to the screen's self-emanating glow.

Through excess and access, the digital revolution has undoubtedly changed our culture, our relationship to reality, and the function of the image. The images produced and consumed by our culture are no longer a product of our reality, but define it. Through my work, I use painting as a tool to not only understand the new role of images but the role of art.