Mapping Landscape Paintings: Joe Hamilton's 'Indirect Flights' on the front page

Joe Hamilton's Indirect Flights is on the front page of rhizome.org through Sunday, as part of the ongoing online digital painting exhibition "Brushes," presented by Rhizome and the New Museum as part of the First Look series.

All of the works in "Brushes" are paintings made on the computer and shown primarily online. The exhibition focuses on works that are derived from an artist's bodily gestures, rather than those that are derived from code-based practices. In the case of Indirect Flights, the brushstrokes in the work are actually sampled from high-resolution scans of landscape paintings by notable historical figures like Van Gogh and Arthur Streeton. Thus, the gestures in this case were made long ago on canvas, and only later translated to digital form. 

Hamilton writes,

The brushstrokes are included in a panoramic collage that also includes satellite images, organic textures, and architectural fragments, which can be navigated via a a Google Maps-like interface. I was drawn to the use of found aerial photography as a base for the work and then contrasting it in the foreground with my own close up photographs of raw materials and architecture. A mixture of micro and macro, found and recorded, personal and impersonal.

The work includes sound by J.G. Biberkopf; it was supported by The Moving Museum. A past interview with Hamilton about the work can be read here.