Midwest
Spotlight Artist
Keith Tolch
Midwest
Artist Statement
Emerging from a place of pixelated edges and backlit wire-framed
spaces, my work engages with the resistance of an impenetrable
surface. The formal structure of digital space and the peculiar
landscapes and theoretical environments of video games and
operating systems provide me with an access point to visual
architectures unique to my digitally enmeshed moment in history.
These visual elements coalesce into an experience that
approximates painting. A unique vocabulary and an identity
of mark making, pictorial space, and formal relationships
materialize. The latent potential of marks is rendered active,
expressing moments of extreme amplitude nested between
the lowest possible frequencies. It is here, in the lows, where
possibility is inverted and compounded, stultified, broken down,
and—without resignation—transformed.
These peculiarities belong to a specific moment within the
expansive history of painting. I position myself at this vantage
point as a reflective surface, a relay of sorts, internalizing and
expressing outwardly a very particular and quirky understanding
of where painting has been, has not been, and may still go.
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