Second Life, Third LIfe

The Shew Stones exist in a variety of forms – here presented as photographical subjects, the tablets exist as interactive social practice props for participants to hold and gaze into. Obsidian blocks shaped into tablets comparable to cell phones or tablet computers find similarities in the ancient spiritual practice of obsidian gazing as a clairvoyant tool and modern technology enabling near-constant access to information and direct channels of communication. Beyond the shape, the stone’s physicality reminds one of the powered off screen, bringing to question the power inherent to the communications devices beyond that enabled by LTE.

The works in the “Invisible Monster” series begin their cycle as photographs digitally altered by the artist to create unrecognizably human figures. These images are then transferred onto imposingly large columns of paper, providing the work with an undeniable physicality. This duality between digital dehumanization and physical reconstruction becomes a theme of the series, examining similar processes at play in social media’s bastardized presentation of supposed realities.

Initially using a similar process as Potter through digital reconstruction of photographs, Wilkinson’s work begins with found images rather than directed portraits. The image here presents a manipulated masculinity as constructed by this posed pinnacle of strength. The theatricality of the figure’s initial pose is understood as queer through the collaged contact with his own male figure, illustrating a queer sensibility in the construction of masculinity through celebrity. This complicates the influencer narrative, constructing individualized surrealities from celebrity image, informed by but unintended to recreate the framed confines of the public-facing presentation of self.

The piece represented here indicates at once an alternative to and a further symptom of suffocating digitization of everyday life. Shelter-in-place and safer-at-home orders have altered as well the human relationship with the outdoors immediately surrounding our home habitats, and the viewer can find resonance in the intricate and inseparable relationship between humanity and nature represented in the image. Through this image, as well, the artist constructs an alter-human and an alter-nature. Impossible beings are represented in the bouquet, a collage of parts alienated from the connection to parts which give them utility. In the construction of online representations of full personalities, these functional interrelations may also be lost.

The “Invisible Monster” series is incredibly physical in the scale of the works, but the process of getting the images to the paper involves digital and technological mediation. Though Potter constructs the initial images of the works through a computer, the artist admits a frustration that arises from working with digital art methods. But despite the explicit critique of online modalities of expression, the works are not Luddite, coming out of that interplay between the digital and physical worlds.

This digital-disruption-turned-painting reframes a posed vulnerability into something at once dehumanized and more authentic. The subject matter (and state of undress) is more something you would see on a finsta or “Close Friends” story than a primary account, but the digital world has made space for all such expressions. The image calls to mind the impulse against celebrity in the time of quarantine. The online presentation of gorgeously kept houses with miserable faces singing John Lennon songs does not inspire universal togetherness.

Under quarantine, the omnipresence of digital communications is easy grounds for hyperstimulation coexisting with monotony. The overextension of the limbs and head in this piece provide a sense of drowning in technology. The absence of color in the series reminds the viewer of an ultimate monotony of endless scrolling and of a filtered surreality presented by social media.

The stone is earlier presented in a commercial context and here in a utilitarian context. The stones imply a spiritual materiality similar to the faux-invisibility of telecommunication technology. Though the servers and satellites are kept from immediate view, this mock-telepathy is constructed, too, of stone and metal and earth.