Artist Statement

I am a new media painter asking “Where do the lines blur between digital and material painting?” I make paintings, animations, shareable digital artifacts and installations based on rejected materials and ephemera – those of the curb, the studio and virtual space. These works use the language of painterly abstraction to evoke desire in viewers for once rejected objects. The goal is to help viewers imagine alternative possibilities and resources for painting and for trash. My scanner works and digital paintings zero in on the objects found in haphazard curbside still-lifes within the landscape. My animations and digital artifacts attempt to highlight the slippery boundaries between physical and digital systems and space. 


Contact me @ liztrosper [at] gmail [dot] com. 

WTF is a scanner painting?

Scanograms or scanography is a term that has been established for some time, in which an artist lays and manipulates objects, materials and images on a flatbed scanner that are captured by CCD arrays or other arrangements of banded image sensors that move across the platen. This form of art was pioneered by artist Sonia Landy Sheridan at The Art Institute of Chicago while being artist in residence at 3M. Much of the work being done in this field or “discipline” (if you can call it that) has been associated with the history and discourse of photography. 

Alternatively, scanner painting sits within the discourse of painting, which concerns itself with color, abstraction, gesture and does, itself, intersect with concerns in photography such as pictorial space, time, low and high definition and so on. Uniquely, scanner painting is an analogy for the flatbed picture plane of painting, pioneered by Rauschenberg and articulated by Steinberg. Its concern is about experimenting with digitality and materiality and the possibilities where the boundary between the two become blurred. At times, I approach these works by creating miniaturized paintings, sculptures and images that can be manipulated on the surface of the scanner bed. At other times, I use found garbage. In either case, these materials and objects become gestures as they are factored with my hand, the motion of the scanner and their various placements and movements across the platen. As an archive of hundreds of images build up, one can begin to see an overall essence and unity between a body of work while sensing the infinite varieties that become possible with each variable present in the work -- positions of elements, repetition of elements, variations in the rhythms of those elements, the ephemeral chromatic aberrations, motion blurs and depth of field created by the way the scanner’s unique vision “sees” and records visual information. 



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