justin bower

I paint the face as an uncanny representation and site of turbulent subjectivity. I use the face as a performative space, or armature, to interrogate the ‘humanist subject’ from a posthuman vantage point.

In this series of paintings I use an anonymous image culled from the internet, re-interpreting the image in every painting. The multiplicity and endless variation of this image confuses an authentic origin, reaffirming the tension between the digital image and a real world counterpoint.

I postulate and show that literally and figuratively, body boundaries are leaking and putting into question the stability of subjectivity. Biotechnologies, with its regenerative qualities and coding of the human, are suggested in my paintings as the endless generative quality of one image without an original. My subjects are contradictory and unstable, in an un-fixed position (optically and conceptually), courting a felt tension between rupture and rigidity in the construction of the painting. I use the doubling of certain features on the face (such as three eyes, spliced noses, melting mouths) to optically play with this instability, and I conceptually destabilize the subject by creating an open system that doesn’t complete the subject, addresses androgyny and the state of becoming/unbecoming.

I complicate the function of skin/flesh as a boundary between biological interiority and externalized technologies through the sense of ‘space’ or openings in the flesh. My posthuman ‘subjects’ play with the boundaries separating the organic/machinic, human/non-human, interiority/exteriority, and self/other binaries.

My paintings depict the subject not as identification but of transformation, metamorphosis and catastrophe. They are not representative, they are performative, a boundary site and surface---neither entirely natural nor cultural but a configuration that negotiates the limits of corporeal existence within an increasingly technological environment.