Artist Tessa MacKay re-creates ‘objectively crappy images’ in Social Realism exhibition | USAEMALL.com

Acclaimed WA artist Tessa MacKay’s latest work is overexposed and the composition is terrible, a far cry from the picture-perfect portrait of David Wenham that won her the prestigious Archibald packing room prize in 2019.

And MacKay wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I was reflecting on how photoreal painters typically choose these perfect source images to justify the thousands of hours it takes to paint in this super technical style,” MacKay tells STM.

“So I decided to invert this metric of labour and paint some objectively crappy images, which led me to the phenomenon that was 2000s Facebook photo dumping.”

Back then, it was commonplace to dump unwieldy galleries of images on Facebook, often while paying scant attention to whether the photos were in focus, properly lit or accidentally taken.

“We’re all so digitally isolated now and our online avatars are curated within an inch of their life in service of the reputational economy of ‘likes’ and follows,” MacKay explains.

“But there was this finite moment in human history when we all participated in this far more honest and convivial form of online social interaction, uploading our images with no real intent beyond a kind of absent-minded fun.”

MacKay trawled Facebook and curated a few thousand of these “low-value” images, choosing a selection to form the basis of an exhibition of new works she’s titled Social Realism.

It’s like if Monet decided to take a break from his picturesque pond and its water lilies, opting instead to take his easel to the local tip.

As sifting through someone’s garbage can tell you something about them, sifting through digital detritus is insightful, too.

MacKay says those who have seen her new pieces are left pondering the path humanity has taken in the social media age.

“People seem to recognise this not-so-distant time, when images served a genuine social utility and it looked like Facebook and social networks at large might actually deliver on their promise of creating the new digital town square, before something far more superficial, narcissistic and insidious began to emerge,” she says.

Turning one person’s trash into an artistic treasure is no easy task.

“In figuring out how to best transpose the low-fi digital aesthetic of these images into paintings, I’ve had to understand how digital camera sensors work and, more specifically, the technology’s limitations in this 2000s era,” MacKay explains.

“There are these different types of digital aberrations — low-light noise, pixel bleed, highlight clipping et cetera — each requiring totally different approaches to painting technique and materiality.

“For example, my latest work uses chunky loomstate linen sized with finely chopped pet fur to mimic the randomised texture of digital noise in the shadows.”

The new pieces represent more than just an artistic left turn.

Before coming to national prominence, MacKay first found refuge in large-scale photorealism portraiture painting.

Painstakingly re-creating images at the most minute level, on canvases measured in metres, doubled as a crucial strategy for managing dyslexia and inattentive ADHD.

But at what point does a refuge become a prison, a creative cul-de-sac? This was the dilemma MacKay grappled with, before eventually choosing discomfort over a status quo that had brought her success.

Photorealism and hyperrealism have attracted criticism in recent years, as pundits acknowledge the labour but question where the art can be found in such highly technical styles.

As someone whose brain is hardwired to struggle with the conceptual aspect of art, MacKay defaulted to the hard-won technicality these pundits were now dismissing.

However, the evolution of her practice was only ever intrinsically motivated.

“For years, I had found refuge in painting these enormous and time-consuming photoreal works that shielded me from really interrogating why I paint,” she admits.

To have the tools to tackle this interrogation, the artist embarked on a two-year cognitive training program that allowed her to return to a fine arts degree at Curtin.

There she was able to critically explore and reflect on her work, expanding her photorealism to include formalist elements from classical realism, 17th-century Dutch golden age painters and 18th-century neo-impressionists.

This is particularly significant to Social Realism.

In the age of generative AI, where perfection is a prompt away, the imperfect may be the last bastion of humanity.

“Photorealism is birthed from and reliant on photography and typically avoids a painterly aesthetic, with little to no obvious brush marks, but it’s very much my intent that these works look specifically like paintings of digital photographs from this era,” MacKay says.

“In an increasingly synthetic world, the apparent human labour and raw materiality of these works is important to me, grounding these otherwise easily dismissed digital images within a more historic painting tradition.”

Social Realism opens on February 5 and runs until March 11 at Lawson Flats