Description
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Ann Morgan has spent most of her personal and professional life virtually: Developing websites, playing video games, text-only friendships with people who might not exist. Post-pandemic, living digitally through screens is central to the shared human experience. She starts from this new reality to create large-scale landscapes in oil paint. Her current work draws from images prompted from an A.I. model trained on her own photos and friends’ social media images they have shared. Morgan uses Photoshop and several A.I. platforms to manipulate and play until she reaches a digital version of what lies outside; a new realism. She uses A.I. as a form of automatism or a Magic Eight Ball, accessing the material from her past work and memories with A.I. providing a layer of technology and meditation. Working backwards from traditional landscape painting, she makes digital image mashups into large physical objects only experienced fully in real life. The heroic landscape painting, in history, is a depiction of an ideal world with ties to the reality of nature – Morgan’s idealized reality is virtual.
For Morgan, after spending much of the past year in Michigan and in her childhood home, it made sense to her to revisit the earliest version of herself with memories, both her own and those of the collective accessed through AI:
“My series Once When I Was You is especially meaningful as I’ve worked on it leading up to and after my fiftieth birthday – it seems I need to evaluate and examine everything leading up to this moment at once to move forward to the next phase of my life… Once when I was a college student, or a child, working to get ahead in my career in tech, approaching middle age, or any number of versions of myself that are in my past and in a space that others occupy now.”
Ann Morgan’s work is part of private collections in London, Chicago, Anchorage, Denver and Detroit.
© Ann Morgan