Contemporary Absurdism & Oil
This project took a centuries old sacred art medium (oil painting) and used it to scrappily paint a series of screenshots from a viral video from last year.
This video was largely my first exposure to contemporary absurdism, a montage of stupid videos with videos of the earth to place everything we’ve come to know in context with the universe around us. Reminding us how marvelous life is and beauty in the Absurd.
Rather than explaining Absurdism, this project is a direct response to it. Given that Absurdism exists on a ‘know it when you see it’ basis, this project sets out to take part in it.
Production
These paintings were produced on 20x20 cm canvas, with a focus less on quality but more so on capturing the roughness and poor quality of each still of the video. I did not set out to create visual information that wasn’t there originally, if there was no fingers in the picture, I didn’t paint fingers.