DEAR FRIENDS AND REPETITION: An exhibition of new works by Sebastian Black

PRESS RELEASE:
The painting entitled Dear Friends depicts India on a lounge chair in front of a fig tree beside the pool at the sublet where we temporarily reside. The other paintings, titled Grant’s Pool, Grant’s Pool, Grant’s Pool, Grant’s Pool, Grant’s Pool, Grant’s Pool, and Grant’s Pool, respectively, depict the shallow end of the same pool. All of the paintings are copied from images taken with a thermal camera that attaches to my iPhone. The thermal camera is a small direct-to-consumer product that is billed as a useful tool for home repair projects as well as a nifty bauble for observing critters in your yard or even for making art. It plugs into the Lightning port at the bottom of my phone and, like a rain stick, must be constantly jiggled in order work properly. The company that produces the camera also specializes in methods of thermal imaging which are more powerful and effective and consequently more explicitly nefarious. What else? The paints I use are minerals bound in oil pressed from walnuts or flax seeds. Their binder is transparent, unlike the oil around the phone and the camera, which has been rendered hard and opaque through a process that is beyond me. The inside of the iPhone is also too complicated to get into here, though perhaps it is not as complicated as a leaf.
- Sebastian Black