Anne Vieux

Anne Vieux: Mirror Proxies | The Hole - 86 Walker Street

For her second solo show with The Hole, Vieux extends and deepens the parameters of her practice, which centers on the longstanding artistic tradition of using tools wrong. She begins each large prismatic canvas by feeding holographic paper into a scanner, confounding the diodes in its CCD array. The resulting images are an explosion of refractions, which she reproduces through a rigorous layering of techniques, including hand-painting winding channels that mimic the effect of Photoshop’s “heal” tool. Vieux’s new video work, which fills three walls of the rear gallery, uses animating software to bring movement to the digitally captured gestures that are the foundation of her painted works.

Vieux is careful to alter her machine-generated images with the same logic and precision as the tech she deploys. It’s often impossible to tell which parts of her canvases are hand-rendered and which aren’t, which are random and which are deliberate. And that is partially the point: from where we’re sitting, at this hallucinatory junction of technology and human virtuosity, it doesn’t really matter.

This show comprises the artist’s latest strategies for slowing the experience of the virtual while speeding up perception in painted space. It is a challenge, both to the flow of attention as mediated by our devices and to the way we’ve been trained to look at art. Distortions of light, distortions of time: in this body of work, each reveals a spectrum of possibilities.

Anne Vieux (b. 1985, East Lansing, MI) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute. Her recent shows with The Hole include Bio Tech (2021), Paper View (2019), Post Analog Studio (2019), and Command Field (2018). Other recent exhibitions include Phygital Reality (G Gallery, 2022), The Artist is Online (König Galerie, 2021), Tennis Elbow 73 (The Journal Gallery, 2021), and Unfamiliar Again (Newcomb Art Museum, 2017).