NOT REALLY NOW NOT ANY MORE
Philip LaVelle

This exhibition of paintings by Brooklyn based artist Philip LaVelle is a collection of works created over the last two years. Primarily dealing with abstraction, this grouping of art demonstrates different strategies he utilizes to engage with the conceptual seepage between the transference of corporeal and virtual realities. Influenced by ‘posthuman anxieties’ and the ‘techno sublime’ LaVelle uses a series of digitized brush strokes, degraded images such as Deep Fried Memes, and details of environmentally reclaimed urban surfaces as reference points for his abstractions.  His compositions are formed from a collection of both found and created digitized imagery and often references Abstract Expressionist motifs. Paint, prints, and digitized stencils are applied and removed in an additive/subtractive method that gives a sense of erosion and or decay. This labored procedure emphasizes the recessed marks, playing with the perception of foreground/background and renders the subjects with a sense of confusion and abjection.

With an interest in the ubiquity of the digital inescapably immersed in our lives, LaVelle sees his work as more than just referencing this as imagery, but rather that the digital is complicit in its making. By working both intuitively and computationally a collaboration forms between artist and the technology, reifying the digital in paint. He sees each painting not as a singular autonomous work but rather as a part of a perpetual and expositional whole/hole whose project is always in a state of becoming.

About the Artist: 

Philip LaVelle is an award winning multi-disciplinary artist who currently resides in Brooklyn, NY and is originally from Northern Kentucky. His works primarily focus on mixed media painting through a digital lens. He graduated from Ohio University Summa Cum Laude with a BFA in painting and Departmental Honors in Art History with a focus in contemporary theory, and a Master’s of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute.

His work is highly influenced by Art History, digital and commercial design as well as contemporary theorists and science writers including Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Mark Fisher and Marshal McLuhan. His recent work uses painting to look at the digital landscape and how it effects our perceptions of time and reality as well as the physical objects that create portals to this digital non-space.

For more information about Philip and his work follow him on Instagram.