Tiffany Calvert – “The Tulips are too Excitable”

Visit KMAC Contemporary Art Museum to see Tiffany Calvert’s exhibition, “The Tulips are too Excitable”, now through March 2nd. KMAC is open Tuesday – Sunday, 10AM – 5PM.

At the foundation of Tiffany Calvert’s work is a disruption of the binary—between craft and new media, the technology of the past and present, the physical and the incorporeal. Starting with a dataset of 1,007 images of Dutch still life paintings, Calvert uses a machine learning model called a GAN (generative adversarial network) to capture the distinct painting style from the 17th and 18th century. The resulting image could pass for an oil painting, however, upon closer inspection, organic forms morph in and out
and misplaced pixels become tangled together. The final image is then altered by Calvert through a process of selective masking and painterly mark-making that grounds the ethereal digital image into the corporeal world.