Artwork

Allegory of Mars

2023 Competition entry

Detail
Tags

Louiza Combrinck

Details:
Not Signed
Oil on panel
200cm x 60cm
R7000.00
Description:
My artistic practice involves the critical examination of themes relating to landscape and horison, colonial processes of exploration and conquest, as well as the complicated possession and demarcation of land in South Africa. I periodically make use of the Mars Rover image in my work as a method to pose questions about the domesticating European gaze which is often recalled in contemporary Astro-images of the Martian frontier.

This artwork asks questions about the parallels between the historical colonisation of Africa and the contemporary fantasy of someday colonising Mars. What does it mean to colonise land? What are the lasting legacies of colonial landscape representation? How are they presented in today’s scientific data of a largely unexplored planet? Besides these questions, my work is also concerned with the differences between scientific viewing and painterly depiction. How can digital data and digitised landscapes be remediated into oil painting? How does the material quality of oil paint and the painter’s bodily involvement in the process of painting change our interpretation of landscape?

The work carries an allegorical undertone and aims to be technocritical of current advancements of technological imaging, such as Mars Rovers, image generating AI, and space telescopes. Artistic vision can enhance future fantasies of human-machine relationships, interplanetary travel, and even the post-human age, but can also serve to critique the lingering effects of the colonial age in South African landscape painting.

Oil

Detail
Tags

Louiza Combrinck

Details:
Not Signed
Oil on panel
200cm x 60cm
R7000.00

Description:
My artistic practice involves the critical examination of themes relating to landscape and horison, colonial processes of exploration and conquest, as well as the complicated possession and demarcation of land in South Africa. I periodically make use of the Mars Rover image in my work as a method to pose questions about the domesticating European gaze which is often recalled in contemporary Astro-images of the Martian frontier.

This artwork asks questions about the parallels between the historical colonisation of Africa and the contemporary fantasy of someday colonising Mars. What does it mean to colonise land? What are the lasting legacies of colonial landscape representation? How are they presented in today’s scientific data of a largely unexplored planet? Besides these questions, my work is also concerned with the differences between scientific viewing and painterly depiction. How can digital data and digitised landscapes be remediated into oil painting? How does the material quality of oil paint and the painter’s bodily involvement in the process of painting change our interpretation of landscape?

The work carries an allegorical undertone and aims to be technocritical of current advancements of technological imaging, such as Mars Rovers, image generating AI, and space telescopes. Artistic vision can enhance future fantasies of human-machine relationships, interplanetary travel, and even the post-human age, but can also serve to critique the lingering effects of the colonial age in South African landscape painting.

Oil