LAILA now representing Tessa MacKay.

As a painter specialising in photo/hyperrealism—a style deeply rooted in and dependent on photography—MacKay’s artistic practice has evolved to critically examine her inclination to select ‘high-value’ source imagery, which justifies the extensive hours required to achieve such intricate detail. In response to this labour-intensive metric and its often homogenised aesthetic, MacKay now integrates formalist elements from Classical Realism, 17th-century Dutch Golden Age painters, and 18th-century Neo-Impressionists to depict ‘low-value’ digital source imagery. Through this approach, MacKay’s work investigates the evolving role of painters amidst the proliferation of image-making and sharing technologies, and their influence on societal perceptions of value in images, particularly those depicting people.

In her latest body of work, MacKay transposes a series of mid-to-late 2000s lo-fi digital Facebook photographs into paintings, resulting in a compelled re-contextualisation of figurative techniques and materiality. This often involves embracing painterly contradictions to incorporate specific ‘algorithmic’ artefacts characteristic of this era of social-network-driven digital photography, such as low-light noise, pixel-blooming, highlight-clipping, red-eye, and file-compression aberrations.

These works encapsulate a distinct period when early digital photography intersected with the emergence of social networks like Facebook. This formative era is characterised by users who, with little regard for curation, uploaded ‘low-value’ images and ‘tagged’ their friends, creating a novel form of social interaction. This behaviour is unimaginable in today’s context of high digital literacy and the prevalence of impeccably curated imagery aimed at commodification and personal branding. Yet, millions of these low-value images remain stored on Facebook’s servers, forgotten and without purpose. Through painting, the archival significance of these disposable digital images is accentuated, revealing something uniquely authentic and irretrievable.

Tessa MacKay is an artist based in Walyalup/Fremantle, Western Australia. Her inaugural solo exhibition with LAILA is scheduled for September 2025.