Mark Sibley

Artist statement

In an age dominated by information, my practice considers poignancy in the glitch as an interruption to functionality.

Screens appear everywhere, they communicate a humdrum of duplication and replication; it is almost unstoppable and irreversible. Screens create a simulation of a working interface to information. Behind this interface there is complex and unseen network using gargantuan levels of energy. Electricity pervades invisible spaces; a spike of surged electricity is a rare and brief glimpse of a break in flow, an interruption on the point of its own collapse. The Internet is disrupted by an energy source cutting across information like a transverse axis, briefly freeing the machine of its melancholic drudgery.

My practice encompasses the use of the computer to make digital images, as well as "digital" paintings. Currently my work questions dysfunction, considering the temporality of a glitch as an aesthetic. I am making digital artefacts constructed from glitches. A bitmap file is transferable as a digital image, code, or sound format using word and audio programs, altering their locus of meaning.

As well as digital transferability I am intrigued by the increasingly entwined relationship between the virtual image and painting. By mimicking the digital through painting, I examine the temporality of the glitch; paradoxically conceiving interface artefacts as hard objects. My paintings are methodical; made slowly in a laborious fashion, imperfect in their production, whilst attempting precision. I'm engage with computer programs, such as Photoshop that mimic paint qualities, considering the conundrum of replicating the screen my mimesis into actual paintings. I'm drawn to the potentials of optical verisimilitude; particularly in screen light and backlit light. Colour and saturation are important, I'm attracted to the grid- like compression of contained units of colour as opposed analytical variegated colour.