Tiffany Calvert

NEWS:

Curatorial project Holding Pattern at KMAC Museum closed April 9, 2023

Living Arrangements at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, NY, Feb 16 - 25 Mar, 2023

Recent interviews in Majuscule magazine with Amy Wilson, and in Evergreen Review with Joy Garnett

My work was reviewed by poet and critic John Yau in Hyperallergic

Listen to my interview with Justin Key for the podcast Artist Proof on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

contact:   tiffanycalvert @ gmail

About the work

My practice connects painting’s history to our current visual culture, which is shaped in often confusing ways by algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), and blurred boundaries between real and virtual. I use image generating machine learning models (StyleGAN) trained on Dutch and Flemish still life paintings to create new invented images, which I print at large scale. Using stencils to protect parts of the printed images, I paint onto them. These masks create hard edges where paint meets reproduction. 

The machine learning models generate forms reminiscent of still life, but distorted and unexpected. It was, in fact, a viral mutation which created many of the tulips depicted - a virus which today growers must use AI to eradicate. Like AI itself the images are seductive, but the initial beauty of the paintings is a ruse. Reproduction and painterly abstraction are indistinguishable in some places; the paintings unfold to reveal their mutations. 

These blurred boundaries describe both the production and the product of my work–even my own gendered position is unstable, since my paintings contrast flower subjects, historically suitable material for women artists, and interventions into the fields of gestural abstraction and digital media, which are both historically coded masculine.

 Tulips depicted in paintings, like digital imagery (NFTs) have been subject to use as currency, and particularly ripe for economic manipulation. By recalling flower paintings, I elicit their role as emblems of value speculation, futures trading, and Dutch colonialist trade and power. In turn, my work explores the way that painterly “transgression” and invention are often complicit in the expansion of speculative capitalism. Like the invisible hand of the market, AI in our lives is largely invisible. By collaborating with AI, I investigate how these neural networks shape our decisions by predicting and replicating needs and desires.

“For artists of Calvert’s generation, the dilemma of making paintings after its “death” (starting in the 1960s) and “return” (starting in the 1980s) is to choose which legacy to embrace, since each position would seem to exclude the other.

Yet as I see it, she recognizes each of these divergent positions as part of her heritage, and that neither has triumphed over the other, which connects her to artists as different as Burckhardt, Pieter Schoolwerth, and Wendy White (who also earned her MFA from Rutgers), as well as established figures like David Reed, William Tillyer, and William T. Wiley, and artists virtually unknown in America, such as the great Brazilian artist, Leda Catunda. In all of their work, you encounter divisions grinding together with tectonic pressure, never resolving into a unitary whole but never falling apart…

Calvert’s paintings are palimpsests, archeological digs, engagements with art history, improvisational riffs, and fractured views. They wrestle with painting’s dual legacy without settling on an answer — a refusal that fills her works with painterly pizzazz. It is a refusal that connects Calvert to another Dutch artist, Willem de Kooning.”

• from John Yau, Painting’s Divided Legacy, Hyperallergic March 7, 2020.