Pia May Courtley
Bachelor of Fine Arts
Street View, Neither Here Nor There (detail), 2011, watercolour
My latest practice centres on the choices we make—whether to include or exclude—when we ‘see’ and employ landscapes. I paint from photographs, film stills, and most recently Google Street View images, deliberately adding and subtracting to highlight what is already constructed or constituted within seemingly familiar landscape forms. Landscape provides the vehicle through which I create scenes that seem unfamiliar however, upon closer inspection, are recognizable. I attempt to render these scenes with both temporally emerging and temporally receding dimensions, with presence/absence. This particular work comprises of a series of watercolours as abstractions from Google Street View images. Street View provides us with a virtual ‘walk through’ world. We seem to anonymously survey distant landscapes; however we may also seek out a mediated view of our own immediate environment. Using this tool I re-located images of my neighbouring streets I frequent often. By a process of abstraction my aim was to extend the delay that takes place between viewing an image and comprehending it in order to give the spectrum of interpretation a broader field. The juxtaposition of the digital image Vs the handcrafted one speaks to the inherent tension of our modern viewing experience, whereby the human lens is only one of many.
Contact & More Info
- Personal website
- piamaycourtley@gmail.com
- 0431 079 422
