A NEW exhibition at the Swan Hill gallery explores our intimate relationship with the virtual and the physical world.
This striking display is by artist Alison Bennett, who is exploring the latest frontier in digital creativity.
Bennett’s fascination with people’s tattoos and her interest in our relationship with the virtual inspired the display.
Using a flat-bed scanner, she has taken unique “photographs” of people’s tattooed skin.
The result is a series of distorted and subverted images in an extremely high resolution.
We see vibrant body art, skin, hair, nipples in an image that keeps you guessing.
Bennett takes us still further, asking the viewer to take an iPad and hold it in front of each image.
With the use of an app, the image then transforms again to become a virtual sculpture.
The body — arms, torso, breasts — becomes peaks and valleys in what looks like a landscape, or perhaps a face.
Each virtual sculpture is different, based on its corresponding image.
It is a surprising, transformative experience for the viewer, and words do not do it justice.
“I’m very interested in breaking things and seeing what happens,” Bennett says.
She risked damaging her expensive scanner many times as she used it in ways for which it was not intended.
By picking it up and holding it against a person’s body, moving it around them, glitches occur.
It is through these glitches the distorted images have come about. In places they take on a pearly quality.
Bennett believes the scanner is the next frontier in digital art, as was the digital camera 15 years ago.
In using the scanner and the virtual technology, she is engaging with entirely new artistic methods.
“I’m very interested in an augmented reality as a newer form of photography,” she says.
Every day people move between their smartphone and reality, between the virtual and the physical worlds.
Bennett was inspired by that almost seamless relationship.
“When people hold the iPad up to the work they physically engage with it, they walk around it from side to side,” she says.
“It’s not a static work.
“This is much more about asking questions and looking at how people play and explore that dynamic, asking people to think about how they engage with reality.”
She was fascinated by how people used tattoos to express themselves through body art.
One image is of a man in his 50s, a labourer who was excited to see how his own skin could play a role in the exhibition.
Many of Bennett’s models were members of the LGBT community, people who had used tattoos to find peace with their bodies.
“I think it’s a kind of self therapy,” she says.
Shifting Skin will be launched this evening, Friday, July 18, at the Swan Hill Regional Gallery and is showing until August 24.
Floor talks will be held by the artist at the conclusion of the exhibition.
People are also invited to take part by having their own tattoos photographed and used in the exhibition.
For more information about the floor talks and becoming a model, contact the gallery on (03) 5036 2430.
