Fashion Pixels

So I've always had a love/hate relationship with fashion. I appreciate the artistry, the way that identity can be mutable and re-shaped, the textures, colors, the touching upon a utopian dream world etc. But I also hate it, I hate the superficiality, the harmful messages, the way it reduces everything to consumer/producer.
I've been thinking alot about an increasingly digitized world that we live in, and how much of the stimulation that I get is through glowing screens.
So this series of paintings springs from that inchoate bit of thoughts. I painted fashion photography, which transfers it from the glossy mass produced form that I normally encounter it in, and i chose images that exemplify what I love about fashion, the colors, textures, movements. I also chose images that in general obscure and break up the human figure, which I feel make the photos themselves more about abstract compositions in a rectangle as opposed to over-photoshopped  impossible and disgusting ideals of the female form designed to break down self-esteem which increases the likelihood of a purchase.  (I thickened up the red one just a hair so it wouldn't look so fragile.)
the pixels serve a couple different functions. they break up the image even further into abstract compositions, they take the translation of photo to painting even further, and they serve as a reminder of the constant distortions that we in a digitized age are filtering through. Almost every image we see is actually consisting of tiny little pixels that we synthesize into a seamless image. So I wanted the pixels to function almost as white noise on a screen, which I think the big pink one comes the closest to fulfilling that.

P.S. My friend Cassie blogged about one of the pieces. Check it out here