Oliver of the Sky - Favourite This

Setting off by ghosting the trending and firsting evaluative economies of social networking sites like Tumblr and Flickr, ‘Favourite This’ re-blogs clashed maxims and proverbial visual motifs from the World Wide Web, re-ordering and -rendering them on the critical and hierarchical planes of a painting show and a larger, sculptural installation.

Both a celebration and a critique of its screened and interactive iconographies, the works catechize the spatial layouts and normalizing chiaroscuros of both server and offline space, merging and juxtaposing outdoor landscape and architectural features with the structural elements of webpages. In an extraction of their pixilated incarnations, virtual imagery is depicted with fake-digital precision, while remaining open to the errance of the hand-made and accidental. Conversely, elemental forms and otherwise radical iconographies appear as static pixel maps – flatly domesticated, tamed and subsumed in the weird, anti-Euclidean tableaux of both the paintings and the wider, porous installation.