Denny Dimin Gallery was pleased to present a new digital project by Michael Mandiberg, The Zoom Paintings, on November 12th that ran for two weeks. The exhibition was open, Tuesday to Saturday 11 am-to 6 pm EDT exclusively via Zoom. One painting was on view each day, for a total of ten paintings.
“‘It’s Memorializing How Unmemorable It Is:’ Artist Michael Mandiberg on Painting Melancholy Portraits on Zoom,” by Taylor Dafoe in artnet news
“’The Zoom Paintings’ are dispatches from a strange year.” by Sophie Haigney in The Economist
“Artists At Home: Between Familiar Environments And New Perspectives,” by Adam Hencz in Artland
As New York paused for COVID-19, my human contact and communication ceased. Like many information workers, I found myself on hours of daily video calls. A rotation of familiar faces, sitting across from me in unfamiliar rooms punctuated my work-day. I’ve visited makeshift office spaces, the kitchens of co-workers, and the childhood bedrooms of my students, observing the ways in which people choose to frame their environment for a call, or completely neglect to.
In response, I have begun a series of paintings that capture and collect these interactions. Each painting corresponds to one of the video calls I have made while in quarantine, and depicts the room of the person on my call. Sized at 6” x 11” each painting reflecting the Zoom call’s 9:16 proportions. If possible, I have tried to complete each painting in the time-span of the video call from which it was sourced. Still, when the demands of my call keep me from painting, I let myself complete the paintings after the fact. I paint these rooms without the person sitting before the camera. In doing so, this series serves as a record of interactions marked by absence. An absence mediated low quality lenses, compression algorithms, and choppy connections that skew off-white colors into light-pinks, yellows, and cool blues.
This painting practice has helped me cope with the cognitive exhaustion from all the video calls, and the anxiety of self-isolation while the sirens howled through the streets around me. I know that isolation is a privilege, but for me it is a necessary one, as I am immunocompromised. Painting these canvasses has been an attempt to log memory, as much as it is also a practice of self-care and preservation. Time has shifted in the absence of regular routine, and I have lost track of what day it is. These paintings help me keep track of digital experiences that are more likely to slip away and be forgotten. They are memory, and memorials.
Eventually, when we can safely meet in person again, I intend to show these paintings in a grid that resembles Zoom’s grid view. Until then, I will share these paintings through Zoom itself. To see these paintings, please visit the Zoom meeting room, which is open during gallery hours for the two week duration of the project. One painting will be on view each day for a total of ten paintings. Viewers are welcome to stay in the room as long as they like, and return as often as they want.
Michael Mandiberg is an interdisciplinary artist whose work crosses multiple forms and disciplines in order to trace the lines of political and symbolic power as it takes shape online. Building on the conceptual tradition, Mandiberg orders and reorders information, remixing the forms in which it manifests or solidifies. While technically sophisticated, Mandiberg’s work eschews the novelty of new technology in favor of an exploration of appropriation, the digital vernacular, the ways in which these new technologies impact our lives, and the politics and poetics of technological subjectivities.
Mandiberg received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and a BA from Brown University. Mandiberg’s projects have been presented at Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The New Museum, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Denny Gallery, Art-in-Buildings Financial District Project Space, Arizona State University Library/Museum, Eyebeam, and Transmediale amongst others. Mandiberg’s work has been written about widely, including Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and The Wall Street Journal.
Mandiberg is a Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island/CUNY and is on the Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. Mandiberg is also founder of the New York Arts Practicum and co-founder of the Art+Feminism Wikipedia.
