Combing Tumblr for inspirational sources, painter Dan Gluibizzi pairs scenes of friends, porn, swingers, and bongs to form groupings of perfect strangers in his watercolor compositions. In his show “Between Friends” at the Kopeikin Gallery, Gluibizzi explores and questions the social media bonds and the ties of voyeuristic “friendship” in this digital age.
When we consider the vast amount of images available via platforms like Tumblr, Flickr, Google Image search, etc., it is really amazing to contemplate the changing archives available to contemporary artists. Gluibizzi comments on this, “[i]n art school, 20 years ago, you had to go to the art library and spend long – but wonderful hours – going through the racks and finding the pictures and that is something that I think artists will always do, will need to do. But now with Tumblr, it’s wide open.”
More and more, artists are moving towards this vast social media archive, tapping into its potential with massive amounts of free footage and material. Artist Penelope Umbrico, for example, uses photos found on Flickr as her medium for creating mega-meta-visions of the subject at hand (as with Sunset Portraits from 9623557 Sunset Pictures on Flickr 8-22-11). And Gavin Bunner (NAP #65 & 97) uses Google Image searches to create an image bank featuring an array of search-term-subjects to populate his themed paintings.