Selected Paintings By Stanza

 

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Selected Paintings Stanza 2000 - 2020.


This series of artworks represent newly created imaginary cities. The cities we inhabit disclose our behaviour in these systems. What you see in the artworks are fused layers of city patterns in the form of hybridised abstracted cities. These lines, grids, and shapes form the design of the city. Stanza sees these forms as the marks we have made and left behind on the landscape as drawing. In essence the artworks could be said to represent the scars on the landscape that we have created by our living actions or agency. They all have in common that they depict maps with layers of data, mixed information, and they juxtapose various systems about the landscape. These are all based on real cities and use remediated data. These artworks become poetic interpretations of places we inhabit. They might first appear to us as abstracted forms created randomly, however they are part of the fabric of the design of our global cities. These paintings belong to a long standing interpretation of the landscape we inhabit. In thinking and making these artworks, various other things started to inhabit the processes. The concepts of the city of noise, the city of data, the living breathing city space. Within the series some artworks merge city data with other cities to create what Stanza calls ‘The Third Space’, a confused hybrid multi-layered imaginary city. These images also play with the relationship of scale, from the micro to macro. Here the city becomes a living organism; it's alive, always moving towards the edges of space, alive in a viral sense. Each city is built and made from other cities and it is possible to trace each one back to which one, and some are identifiable by their familiarity. However Stanza believes it’s best not to know which city it is, otherwise it becomes too literal. The artworks become an expressive interpretation of the language of landscape that we inhabit through design where data is mixed to create a poetic understanding of the world. A while back near where Stanza lived the police used to put signs up in the street where a crime had been committed. After three months, the walk to the local shops was a laboured depressing affair. They were eventually removed , but the impression they left was a cutting reminder that the experience of the data and information on the city affects the direction of our psyche. Wandering around in a random way (Le Flaneur) it is possible to experience the meta-data of the space to get these re-imagined landscapes. As artworks they make visible the invisible mechanisms of institutions and the proliferation of real-time systems by increasingly abstracting the concrete materiality of things into information. This is reflected as dataflows and as systems observing systems, which is what the artworks are, that is: interwoven, interlinking, meshed, embedded, not framed and constantly moving.