CLAIRE PASQUIER "The first of my two styles focused on cinema and my aesthetic experience of it as a child. With a palette knife I reproduced scenes from VHS tapes that had affected me and questioned my relationship with them. It was both a study in these iconic moments that now overlapped into my new geography and an artistic meditation on what the screen actually looked like. Computers had already accustomed us to flat, high definition virtual worlds but the truth is that these scenes were filled with static and imperfections. My work has pushed me to analyze the power of these memory images, how I see them in relationship to my current life and memories, and to question the overlap of the television screen and the world around me. Recently these questions have lead me to apply the moiré effect found in old television screens to reproduced images from my personal life and Californian culture."
"The second of my styles turned to the concept of the screen as a portal to our identity in the age of internet. I spent eighteen months in residence at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery painting over 180 portraits of people who contacted me through Facebook. I wanted to find a way to bridge my training as a portraitist with the concept of visual identity in a world that was becoming rapidly digital. In a day of excessive personal sharing and over exposure it was fascinating to realize how few of us actually consider our image as something outside of the digital screen space."
"As I continue to explore the concept of the screen and its implications on space and identity, I hope to expand my practice and discover new meaning in an increasingly virtual world through both traditional and modern painting techniques."
"you might have seen this French woman....what you didn't know is that she's an artist...she did a portrait project as the resident artist at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery in 2012. Currently she is exploring the moire effect as a new way to look at paintings in the age of smartphones and mobile photography".
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