Congratulations to Jennifer Greenbug; two of her Constructed Portraits will be on view in Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from Nov 24, 2024–Jul 13, 2025.
This exhibition is LACMA's contribution to the Getty initiative PST : ART : Art & Science Collide. It assesses the state of the visual landscape: “image-editing software has radically transformed our visual world. The ease with which images and text can be digitally generated and altered has enabled new forms of creative experimentation, while also sparking philosophical debates about the very nature of representation.” It promises to “examine the impact of digital manipulation tools from the 1980s to the present, for the first time assessing simultaneous developments and debates in the fields of photography, graphic design, and visual effects.” The show will feature over 150 works, and trace the emergence of distinctive digital aesthetic strategies, relationships to realism, and storytelling.
Jennifer Greenburg’s Constructed Portraits begin from photographic negatives. Through the labor of her hand and modern tools, including AI, the artist sculpts female-presenting portraits. This work needles similar themes to Revising History. Greenburg' uses her artwork to call for reassessment of our belief in the image’s ability to embody reality, asks for more rigorous evaluation of the substructure of visual idealism, and examines the role aesthetics play in establishing cultural norms.