MACHINE MUSE exhibition artist | JOHN HARLAN NORRIS
My current series, titled Onlookers, employs portraiture to interrogate anxieties, hopes, and uncertainties around the acceleration of technological progress and its future implications. These works were initiated by creating a dataset of hundreds of images of my entire body of work as an artist, as well as examples of influences and ephemera surrounding my creative practice. This dataset was then fed into a machine learning program designed to generate new images consistent with those provided. When used with a massive scale set of highly consistent sources limited in scope and range, such programs can produce convincing artificial images of subjects such as cats or sneakers. However, my unorthodox approach of providing a small scale dataset of personally linked but visually inconsistent sources meant to illustrate the arc of an ongoing creative practice produced highly unusual and irregular interpretations of my work that were at once confounding and strangely familiar. I then took these murky, low-resolution images as a starting point and reimagined them as portrait paintings. The re-introduction of human touch, scrutiny, and materiality have led to a body of paintings that I regard as both a form of uncanny self-portraiture as well as a collaboration (albeit one with a non-human entity). For me, these portraits often read as figures in the distance; presences obscured by layers of misunderstanding but seeking a human connection that remains beyond grasp. Are they entirely new digital life forms? Future human avatars whose bodies have been left behind? Apparitions warning of a dehumanized future? Or are they simply the confused remnants of an intentional misuse of an emerging technology? These and other questions continue to accumulate as each new portrait takes shape.
John Harlan Norris is an artist and educator. His paintings and animated works explore alternative approaches to portraiture and investigate notions such as occupational identity, virtual constructions of the self, and public persona. Norris has exhibited his work throughout the United States as well as in Europe and Asia, including recent exhibitions at Susan Moremen Gallery (Louisville, KY), Christoffer Egelund Gallery (Copenhagen, DE), Martin Museum of Art (Waco, TX), Wërkartz (Los Angeles, CA), KMAC Museum (Louisville, KY) and others. His films have been shown at a variety of venues including Supernova Digital Animation Festival (Denver, CO), The American Documentary and Animation Festival (Palm Springs, CA), Montreal International Animation Festival (Canada), and the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival (WI). He is a recipient of an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship in Painting, an Arkansas Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Painting, and two artist grants from the Great Meadows Foundation. He has attended residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts, Willhardt & Naud, and the Vermont Studio Center. In 2019, his book and accompanying soundtrack album Disintegrants were published by Institute 193. Norris lives in Lexington, Kentucky where he is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Kentucky.
