STEPHANIE BERNHEIM
Artist Statement
To take a picture is no big deal, to take one with your mobile phone is the ordinary squared. The phone has become the most basic component of its composite self now outfitted with cameras, programs, tools and Internet. I am trying to tease out the ambiguous space of these technologies and their capacity to create pictures wholly their own. My PalmPilot camera/phone captures traces of travel, architecture and other ordinary moments. They slip easily between familiar textures of the photographic and the associative. Like picking up the phone when someone has mistakenly dialed your number we hear only fragments, a sense of time and mood.
With a limited ability to vary line size and color, I draw on photographs using a basic ”draw on” program in my Palm Pilot. The applied marks appear as strings of pixels creating constant changes in scale. Interventions are painterly, but the painting is a photograph. Sometimes the marks annihilate the photograph; other times, they serve as a passage into it. Notions of gesture are deflated. After drawing on the photograph I send the image through Internet from phone to home, blurring the lines between human subjectivity and technological objectivity.
Past Solo Exhibitions: Palm Project, 2011
Derivatives, 1995
Past Group Exhibitions: 11 At A.I.R., 1996 Works on Paper, 1995