Genetically Modified Paintings

CRISPR Paintings. Click each artwork in the grid below to see it larger, and see the second gallery of smaller artworks further down.

Above: “More Than” - visual genes from each spliced into the others…

Art by Kirby Andersen (K.I.A.) Kirby Anderson

CRISPR is a gene-editing tool that enables genomes to be modified by the cutting out or inserting of snippets of DNA. The below “genetically modified paintings” are created by taking discrete elements — “visual genes” which have been sliced out of separately made paintings or sections — and inserting them into different areas to create new paintings.

Often the work uses found weather, flora, objects, images or text to generate the base imagery which then gets spliced within or across paintings.

The works, though very linear in appearance, are actually non-linear — in time, where genes from earlier paintings can be spliced into future works (one work has had its genes inserted into a dozen other paintings so far), and space, where sections from within each painting are resequenced across the work (bottom into top, etc), and where sections created in different physical locations are brought together. (For example one of the works was done en plein air in sections across Canada, using local ‘found wind’ and flora at each location).

There is an interplay in the works between two and three dimensions (four, if you count time). The three-dimensional found objects utilized to create the work are used as stencils, and so create 2-D shadows or outlines, similar to those found in photograms. However, the substrate of each painting is slices of paper arranged volumetrically, so the ‘color shadows’ are caught three-dimensionally on the textured surface. This causes the work to optically shift and reveal details from different angles as the observer’s point of view changes. The work will also appear differently over periods of time — the complex surface casting unique shadows in different daily or seasonal light, for example appearing differently at dusk with oblique rather than overhead mid-day lighting. Ideally, due to the differences in layer construction (colors, cuts, rips, folds, interleavings and so on), minute or subtle details in the painting may only be noticed months or even years later.

So the painting is made from multiple objects, times, locations, perspectives and dimensions…

CRISPR SILVR