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"I was trained as a painter and for years worked with paint and canvas, but found that I was more intrigued by the process of making an artwork than by the final object. I watched the evolution of each painting I worked on, and enjoyed the many moments of creation and destruction that are woven into that process.  In 1995 when I began working with computer software as a medium, I found that I could make art that was permanently in a state of flux, always evolving, always a potential for change, never a final object.  Since that realization I have not painted again. Now when I make art with software, I'm exploring time, motion, transitions, and forces. Particularly I look for the ways that humans try to grasp and hold, to assert power and control in this new environment. 

With the rapid growth of computer media, we increasingly live and navigate in a world composed of energy: electrical, magnetic and light. Digital media infuse our lives as never before. In this environment, power is no longer associated with physical objects, but with the persistence of ideas in the collective consciousness of the media. 

In my work I explore the excitement and anxiety of this transitional moment.  My work often starts with a question.  If the Internet had a flag, what would it look like?  Is there such thing as decay in a digital world?  What would a monument look like in a space made of software?  This last question gave rise to the series of works in which I created a "soft" Empire State Building: a 3D model of the famous skyscraper that appears to soften and melt, writhing almost organically, then struggle to return to it's original form. Teetering on the line between organism and architecture, these pieces explore the collision between steel and software as the dominant medium of power.  I'm inspired by Cubism -- a form that arose during another period of rapid transition -- and also draw on Francis Bacon's figures, with a nod to the soft scultpures of Claes Oldenburg.  I work simultaneously in painting, sculpture, photography and animation, bringing these forms together to represent an object that is immaterial, ephemeral, almost cloudlike, yet completely durable and real in it's own right."

Mark Napier, 2007

 

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