Akihiko Miyoshi: Resin Paintings - Circuit Gallery, Toronto

Resin Paintings

Artist Statement

In this new work I push my interest in the aesthetic space of digital and networked structures to consider questions of affect and representation, working to find a visual language that conveys or aligns with the mediated experience of seeing through lenses and on screens.

Each work consists of multiple layers of resin on a wooden panel with inkjet pigment sandwiched in-between the resin layers to create an image.

The resin substrate reminds us of the screens, monitors, and lenses that have increasingly replaced other substrates such as paper.

Most of the works have at least 4 layers of resin as each primary color (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black) is applied in a single layer. Thus, one is actively constructing the full color effect as you see through the layers. For example the red you see does not exist in a single space. It is constituted as you see through the layers. As a result, the colors change as you change position, as your viewing angle changes. I consider the work phenomenological and active.

This active quality is important. It is a departure from the traditional static image based on paper or canvas. This allows for a new visual language that I believe is suited to invoke the digital and the network, both of which do not have, in and of themselves, a material basis.

Networked structures (nodes and edges) often occur as motifs in these works. In his book The Interface Effect, Alexander Galloway observes that we do not yet have a critical or poetic language in which to represent the complex networked and distributed structures that pervade our society: “[E]very map of the Internet looks the same. Every visualization of the social graph looks the same. A word cloud equals a flow chart equals a map of the Internet. All operate within a single uniform set of aesthetic codes. The size of this aesthetic space is one.” Importantly, no representation is possible in this uniform aesthetic space as there has only been one visualization or representation of information networks. I am intrigued with his proposition. I am attempting to enlarge this aesthetic space.

The work was supported in part by the Oregon Arts Commission.