Krista Fay
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My work recontextualizes digital symbols in oil paint and isolates “screen” elements on a tangible surface. Vibrant, graphic and colorful, my paintings and installations pair digital symbols with portraiture, flora and fauna, and handmade processes.
Through oil paintings with larger-than-life subjects and interactive web apps and installations I explore the juxtaposition of the living and inanimate, the virtual and physical, and the natural and idealized. Themes in my art include social media, online power-dynamics and self-modification driven by the “tastes” of the online mass subject.
I take inspiration from the writing of Michel Foucault and the concept of the panoptic power hierarchy. Panopticism is a social theory for control in which individuals modify their behavior based on the assumption that they are being watched. In a panoptic society, the threat of one watcher in a tower drives the actions of anyone in view of the tower. In our current society the system of social media drives individual behavior in a similar way. My work focuses on the transformation, modification, or curation of a person caused by a panoptic relation to the online realm.
