Underneath each picture there is always another picture

Amber Frid-Jimenez
November 15, 2024 – Janauary 19, 2025
The Cabinet | Room 4390 – SFU School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver

Reception: November 15, 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM | Refreshments will be served

Amber Frid-Jimenez’s new work revisits Douglas Crimp’s legendary Pictures exhibition of 1977, which gave rise to the Pictures Generation—a movement in which artists appropriated images from popular culture. Using an AI model specially trained on scans from the original 1977 catalogue, Frid-Jimenez fed selected quotes from the text of the catalogue to prompt the model’s generation of new scanned pages. She then printed these AI-generated pages on photographic paper to fit the back wall of the Cabinet. In doing so, the work conjures the original catalogue images through reproductive technologies developed since the Pictures exhibition: the scanner and the AI model, both of which smooth out the contours and specificities of the original images. This process produces an AI-generated palimpsest of the historical artifact.

Through repeated translations of the appropriated pages (which themselves were full of appropriated images), the work refers to the Pictures exhibition as a pivotal moment marking the shift from Modernism to Postmodernism—an era in which artists were no longer required to be the makers of their own images. By delimiting the data set for the AI model, as T’ai Smith writes, “Frid-Jimenez makes us witness the inner workings and ideological functioning of its programs.” The artist returns to the Pictures exhibition to at once interrogate and play with its historical relevance to our ever more mediated image saturated world.

This work is part of a larger project that will include collaboration with T’ai Smith, Julia Trojanowski, and others, with support from SSHRC and Canada Research Chair Program.

Biography

Amber Frid-Jimenez is an artist who explores the cultural mechanics of AI and machine learning through installations, video, artist’s books, prints and code. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions internationally at: Casco Art Institute, Utrecht; Ars Electronica, Linz; FACT, Liverpool; Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, and locally at the Vancouver Art Gallery and Griffin Art Projects, among other places. Frid-Jimenez’s work is in private and public collections, including the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Art in Transit series, Washington, DC, and the permanent collection at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver. She is Associate Professor at Emily Carr University, where she is the founding director of the Studio of Extensive Aesthetics. She is represented by Mónica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver. amberfj.com