Yolanda Warnich

The curious remix of pigments and pixels

(2015-16)

These artworks evolved from Yolanda’s Karoo bit.mapped project, where she took many photographs of the land from her slowly moving car, then manipulated the images digitally via Photoshop. Here though, she used a manipulated digital landscape image as subject matter and painted it onto a support made up of small canvases - painted pixels, just as a photographic image is built up from digital pixels.

Her large canvas surface for painting was constructed with twenty-five 20 x 20 cm canvases in a square format. Using oil paint – a medium associated with traditional landscape painting - she painted the digitally engineered landscape image with all its blurring and defects.

To further emphasise the potential for digital manipulation, the image was taken apart to create smaller compositions. Here a selection of them has been presented as a frieze, as one long horizontal line, mimicking a horizon. Although there is a sense of harmony, the images need not necessarily ‘lead into’ each other, and each has the sense of being an individual - a pigmented pixel.

These various technical manipulations of a conventional subject matter represent Yolanda’s exploration with the creative possibilities of shifting between traditional and new media.

via outoftheCUBE, these works formed part of the exhibition The Crossing Place at the 2016 KKNK, Oudtshoorn, Eastern Cape.