Los Angeles, 2015

Solid State

Steve Turner Los Angeles, June 13 - July 11

Solid State features new painting and sculpture created by combining traditional art-making techniques with new digital processes. The paintings fuse the artist’s hand-drawn gestural marks that are cast in plaster with Internet-sourced, digitally created backgrounds of stone. The sculptures were made using the traditional technique of bronze casting along with contemporary 3-D scanning and machine routing processes. In mixing materials and methods, Staniak explores the different ways in which digital information is changing the physicality of painting and sculpture while addressing the question of permanence in the storage of digital information.

The title itself refers to the latest in hard-drive storage technology, where in solid state drives no moving parts a used; increasing the speed at which information can be transferred and avoiding a higher chance of the hardware breaking down. However, the work also utilizes some of the oldest materials with which we have stored visual information for millennia, namely rock, stone and bronze. The ways in which our technology has evolved allows for an increased to capacity to store physical information virtually. At the same time this information, as has been demonstrated in these works, is prone to easy tampering and corruption. The trust we have endowed on more robust, albeit heavier and bulky materials, has been quickly and willingly replaced by the digital. This at once increases the value of our physical experience while also creating a distrust in the information we upload, share and download on a daily basis.