Jomar Statkun’s THE CHINESE PAINTING: A Distinguishable Moment Within an Infinitesimal Increment in a Variable, 2011, originates with an abstract painting, but ends, at least in this iteration, with many beats of pixilated sound. Statkun’s work centers on concepts of authenticity and the artistic process; he examines the way images are perceived, translated, filtered, and re-appropriated. In this piece, presented as an installation/performance, Statkun acts as mediator between his work, his audience, and a group of 14 selected collaborative performers, who interact with the newest version of his “image.” The work’s many trajectories and transformations document Statkun’s own artistic exploration. Starting with a thick, painterly abstraction made several years ago, he used an image-based computer application which attempts to recognize or “locate” images from a vast, digital database. Given the painting’s lack of identifiable features, the computerized outcomes were highly “translated,” providing concrete visual imagery for something essentially image-less. A selection of results—landscapes, people, mythological and fantasy scenes—was sent to a painting reproduction factory in China, where workers hand-reproduced the images, again re-interpreting them. Statkun’s removal of himself from the process conceptually echoes the distance of the artist from the print, and references the idea of the multiple—essentially, his “matrix” is the original abstract painting, displaced by its “copy.” With the hired participation of Chinese workers, Statkun comments on ideas of labor and third-world exploitation while questioning ideas of authorship and originality.  

The paintings were next scanned as halftones and shot to silkscreen in a grid of 28 images. The silkscreens, printed in black-and-white, wallpaper the exterior and interior of a room-like, free-standing structure, which serves as the catalyst for the images’ next variation. (The silkscreened wallpaper aptly references an original use of the technique, while also linking its history of mass-production to the repetitive quality of the Chinese factory.) Chinese paintings and reference material (the images’ website sources, photographs of the Chinese “artists,” copies of Statkun’s signature) are displayed, as if decorating a house of infinite variables. Within the installation, Statkun positions himself as “MC”—he is yet another filter in the process—and uploads the halftone files to a computer program that converts their “dots” to beats (from visual data to sound data). The elementary music provides background for a series of invited performers who engage (some improvised, some not) the images’ rhythms, filtering yet again with their own artistic response. Set up as a casual, round-table-like discussion, Statkun becomes the moderator of a collaborative “conversation”—its subject the now audible images, the artist simply one working part of a larger mechanism. In the continuing evolution of his project, Statkun searches for the ultimate distillation of an artwork’s “essence,” attempting to dislodge its authenticity and removing his “hand” from the process. Yet, even in diffusion, a discernable path remains, the many variables connected by their own particular history.