Rory Torstensson

Fertilizer

2024

Acrylic, soft pastel, graphite, coffee, india ink, transfer on paper

Acrylic on gessoboard

Calvert’s current paintings investigate the relationship between digital media and the reception and perception of images, and utilizes diverse technologies such as fresco, 3D modeling, AI and data manipulation through code. She is especially interested in the evolution of pictorial space. Today we view our screens and the world they occupy as a shallowly layered space of overlapping desktop windows. The picture plane has tilted up again from the flatbed to float in front of our eyes. Calvert’s paintings in turn depict an intermediate space, where the verticality of the still life paintings cohabitate with these digital panes. Dutch floral still life paintings encapsulate multiple concerns. Their subjects were botanical fantasies, emblems of an economic mirage that has contemporary corollaries. Most important to Calvert’s pictorial concerns, they depict ephemeral things in shallow and diagrammatic space - they are all foreground. They contain an abundance of visual information in overwhelming density, creating an allover resolution; a visual field that is equivalent to digital noise. By making painterly interventions into reproductions, Calvert attempts to dissolve the layer between the resolution of the source image and abstraction of the painted mark. ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ Tiffany Calvert has exhibited her work in the US and abroad including Lawrimore Project in Seattle, E.TAY Gallery in New York, the Speed Museum in Louisville and Cadogan Contemporary in London. Residencies include the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, I-Park, and ArtOmi International Arts Center where she received a Geraldine R. Dodge Fellowship. Calvert has received grants from the Great Meadows Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Her work was recently profiled by critic John Yau in the online journal Hyperallergic. Her curatorial projects include “Some Abstraction Occurs” at 65GRAND Gallery in Chicago and “Magic” at Mercer College (featuring work by Chris Martin, Karla Knight, and Sarah Peters...

As an artist, TIFFANY CALVERT applies contemporary painting techniques to historical imagery. Her recent work uses the seventeenth-century Dutch floral still life as a springboard fo...