Reality Distortion
Playing with traditional portraiture, Richard Graves paints watercolor subjects that shift uncertainly on different planes of existence.
ON VIEW on April 15th, 2021
6:00pm Artist Talk on Instagram LIVE (WATCH REPLAY)
6:30pm Opening on Facebook LIVE (WATCH REPLAY)
Works available for purchase 4/15 - 4/22.
Local food feature:
Frannie’s Vegan Café,
Johnson City, TN
photo courtesy of Frannie’s Vegan Café
Enjoy a 100% plant-based full service vegan cafe, which touts that “there is something for everyone, vegans and non vegans alike!”
More information available via their Facebook page.
Reality Distortion
mixed-media watercolors by Richard Graves
exhibition view & details
Glitch in Gold, 16x20 mixed media on canvas
Audacity, 11x14 alcohol ink on yupo paper
Glitch in Happiness, 8x10 watercolor and ink on hotpress paper
Glitch in Identity, 8x10 mixed media on paper
Glitch in Living, 8x10 watercolor on hotpress paper
Hold On to Yourself, 16x20 mixed media on canvas
Long to Live, 11x14 watercolor on hotpress paper
March 21, watercolor on hotpress paper
Kiss and Cackle, 16x20 mixed media on canvas
ARTIST STATEMENT
This collection, Reality Distortion, is heavily influenced by glitch art. My background is in broadcast journalism, where I spent a good deal of time editing audio in order to tell the stories of this region. This series started with experimentation using audio editing software to create “glitches” in images, and then using the principles from that practice and applying it to traditional painting and illustration. The manipulations that I first became familiar with while editing in audio- clipping, echoes, reverb, and distortion- were all things that I wanted to incorporate into a visual style of fractured portraiture.
The glitches also felt particularly congruent with the feelings of isolation and absurdness brought on by the pandemic. Having the subjects feel more alienated and creating a new, splintered reality for them to live in was a way that I digested feelings about the world in quarantine. These environments sometimes felt toxic or chaotic, always surreal, and occasionally started to corrupt and distort the figures themselves, creating splintered representations of the anxieties that have become so prevalent. I used these subjects’ places in compositions as a space for self-reflection as a way to examine my own reality and identity in surroundings that were starting to be unrecognizable to me. Mirror images that were slightly off, or thinking of the portraits like reflections helped me get into that internal world I was trying to co inhabit with the subjects.
The pandemic also brought many opportunities to see the problems in our society that are beyond the individual - creating space for new perspectives on issues of racial justice, sexism, income inequality, and the systemic issues that make meeting the basic needs of our respective communities much harder than it needs to be. I wanted these subjects in this collection to act as symbols for the “glitches” in our humanity, highlighting the incongruences between the world we live in and a more equitable and inclusive society.
As I faced tremendous change the last year, I felt like the ideas and “characters” in my work did too, and I like to imagine we all adapted and felt empowered enough to forge ahead together, adapting to these new realities while continuing to imagine and work towards empathy.
—Richard Graves