At the foundation of Tiffany Calvert’s work is a disruption of the binary—between craft and new media, the technology of the past and present, the physical and the incorporeal. Using Dutch still life tradition both as inspiration and data, Calvert’s work presents questions related to the screen space, the role of technology within craft, and the perceived incompatibility between the latter.

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The Tulips are too Excitable features work core to Calvert’s practice involving still life tradition, AI machine learning, and painterly abstraction. Combining old and new media, Calvert’s work asks the viewer to consider the impact of the digital screen on the ways in which visual culture is generated and consumed. As the discourse surrounding artificial intelligence turns towards the ethics of cultural production, Calvert’s work exposes the inherent failures that differentiate the machine from the human hand.

 

Starting with a dataset of 1,007 images of Dutch still life paintings, Calvert uses a machine learning model called a generative adversarial network to attempt a verisimilitude of the style of painting that flourished in Northern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. The result is an image that, at a glance, could pass for an oil painting. Upon closer inspection, however, organic forms may morph in and out of recognition as unidentifiable flower petals bear alien auras and misplaced pixels become tangled together. The final image is then printed and altered by Calvert through a process of selective masking and painterly mark-making that grounds the ethereal digital image into the corporeal world. A duet between human and machine, each painting flits between representation and abstraction as the eye searches desperately for something familiar.

 

Notably included in the exhibition is #350, representative of Calvert’s recent experimentation with buon fresco, an infamously labor intensive technique that involves applying pigment to wet plaster. This process underscores Calvert’s approach to her work, one that considers artistic methods as technology. Artwork featuring processes like jacquard weaving that foreshadow the computer were part of Holding Pattern, an exhibition co-curated by Calvert, Jennifer Oladipo, and Kelsey Shaeer and shown at KMAC Museum in collaboration with Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville in March 2023.

 

Likewise, in her own practice, Calvert is not reconciling any difference between traditional and new media, but rather, exposing the interconnected nature of craft and technology. The work in this exhibition was funded in part by the University of Louisville. Special thanks to Hank Allgeier, Claire McMahon, Michael Nichols, Sara Olshansky and FirstBuild.