Interface Cathy Helps

Cathy Helps Interface paintings explore aspects of internet spectatorship and representation. Helps contrasts the slow and conservative methods of painting with the new and fashionable modes of new technologies. She explores the tensions between technologies and what they can do, between the flattened surface of the digital image that promises of connection and desire, a uniformity of a look regulated by the technology, with a messy painterly surface suggesting anxiety, despair or something darker. Selecting images that circulate in our media saturated environment, Helps examines the way that the screen mediates the way we view the world as well as interact and construct ourselves.

Click to download the exhibition text (PDF)

Presented alongside Boris Dornbusch Paviljon Marinum and Justine Walker Is this Enough? These exhibitions explore lives lived through, constructed by or remembered because of the screen.

Blue Oyster Discussion Session 3: Wednesday 5 August, 5:30pm

The death of painting is something that seems to be announced periodically whenever a new 'threat' raises its head - photography, video, performance, conceptual art and now digital/new media.

Our third discussion will look at the the legacy (and reiteration) of claims that painting is an outmoded medium and also consider the (after)life/rebirths of painting.

To help us explore this territory:

Cathy Helps, Painter
Alex Kennedy, Painter and Lecturer at the Dunedin School of Fine Art
Kim Pieters, Painter and Filmmaker