Courtesy: the artist and LON Gallery, Melbourne.

LON Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new work by Naarm/ Melbourne based artist, Annika Koops. The exhibition comprises a suite of new paintings on linen and paper that continue the artist’s investigation into the porosity of boundaries between physical and virtual spaces, objects, and persona.

“To be a bad actor in a theatrical sense is to fudge the role: to overact or take the viewer out of the scene. A bad actor in a moral context conjures a person or group with dubious motives.”

Koops’ forthcoming exhibition re-stages painterly gestures to toy with the reciprocity between these meanings in the context of digital environments.

The paintings are a combination of spontaneous, abstract brushwork that is digitally modelled and run through simulations and rendering before being re-painted: bringing the original marks into contact with densely mediated versions of themselves. The spatial disorientation in the paintings reflect the privileging of appearances and rhetorical grift typical of online environments: when it is not possible to tell if an something is made by a machine or human, the bad actor is both distant and ever present.

Opening Event: Saturday 29 July, 3 – 5pm.

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