Underneath each picture there is always another picture
Amber Frid-Jimenez
November 10, 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 returns to Douglas Crimp’s legendary Pictures exhibition of 1977, which gave rise to the Pictures Generation, in which artists appropriated images from popular culture. Using an Artificial Intelligence model specially trained on the scans from the original 1977 catalogue, Frid-Jimenez fed carefully selected quotes from the text of the catalogue to prompt it to generate new scanned pages from the catalogue and printed them on photographic paper to fit the back wall of the Cabinet. In doing so, the work conjures the original catalogue images through reproductive technologies invented since the Pictures exhibition, the scanner and the AI computer model, both of which smooth out the contours and specificities of the original images, producing an AI-generated palimpsest of the historical artifact. Through repeated translations of the appropriated pages of the original catalogue (which itself was full of appropriated images), the work highlights the cultural significance of the Pictures exhibition as an event which marked the shift from Modernism to Postmodernism, an era in which artists were no longer required to be the makers of their own images. Frid-Jimenez returns to the Pictures exhibition to recover its historical relevance in relation to contemporary technological changes in the production and circulation of images. By delimiting the data set for the model, as T’ai Smith writes, “Frid-Jimenez makes us witness the inner workings and ideological functioning of its models.”
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. https://amberfj.com