Exhibition Review: A Change of View from “An Impossible Perspective”

 

A Change of View from “An Impossible Perspective”

Flowers, nature and greenery are all things that can be described as pure and natural. At first glance, the photographic collages by the artist Sanaz Mazinani could be viewed as a capture of the Earth’s natural beauty. That is, until one takes a closer look. Fabricated, plastic, and with a machine-like order is the reality of Mazinani’s work. The solo exhibition at the Stephen Bulger Gallery, “An Impossible Perspective,” uses the aesthetics and beauty of photographs of flowers combined with artificially generated images to create collages. Mazinani takes what is earthly and feeds it through AI, thus mechanizing and falsifying it. Through a walking tour of the exhibition with Mazinani, I was able to form my own observations with the context from the artist herself.

Strewn across the walls the satisfyingly vibrant shades of various flowers acted like candy for the eyes. It’s organized methodologically. A sense of perfection. There are nine works in the exhibition, each with a similar aesthetic quality. Mazinani’s process involved photographing plants, both real and plastic, and using AI to either sort the images, create its own version of them based on the information she gives and also attempt to distinguish between what is real and fake. Mazinani used the term “deep fake” to describe the images heavily altered. In the work Red Flowers (Animate or Inanimate), one can see very obviously the difference between the fake plants and real ones. This composition is predominantly monochromatic with the colour red, yet some flowers can be seen with white plastic cutlery jutting out of them. Mazinani described this as a kind of evolutionary creation where AI has the ability to generate new species that look as though they could exist, but not quite. Taking something free-flowing and natural like flowers and organizing the images in a very structured and geometric way helps allude to the AI involved. In the work From Geometric to Organic, this relationship between the natural and fabricated is highlighted through the very linear composition of the cut images. They are robotic, almost like a splay of parts of a car laid out. This organization further pulls the images away from being earthly to a new, machine-like order. 

Sanaz Mazinani, From Geometric to Organic (AI Generated images vs. Lens based Photography),2023.

The focal point of the exhibition is a 70x by 344 inch set of panels, All the Flowers dominating the gallery by the sheer grandness of its size and vibrancy of its colours. There's a surrealism about this work where the edges between different photographs are sometimes visible, others not. Mazinani plays with symmetry, having some flowers reflected invertedly, further distorting the work. There’s a sense of organized chaos; no image draws my eyes more than another. This work truly blurs the boundaries of real and fake with an effervescent glow to some of the flowers making them otherworldly.

 At the time of viewing I felt very separate from the work, as though the synthesization through AI prevented me from forming a connection with the images I saw. Despite them being of flowers, an element so familiar, the work felt distant, like the default floral wallpaper on a Macbook screen. Mazinani discussed how we observe thousands of images every single day, and the creation of these pieces analyzed around 15,000 of them. But, even seeing the works in person, and the knowledge that they were constructed with AI made me feel as though I was looking at works on a screen, like quickly scrolling on Instagram, TikTok or Pinterest. No transcending emotion of discomfort, joy, fear or shock was felt when viewing these works.  Perhaps this lack of emotion or contemplation with the images also came from my first time encountering work in a commercial gallery. After walking through the show I looked through the catalog in shock at the prices ranging from $5000 to $48,000. Works selling for thousands of dollars and in my mind I was confused, hadn’t it just been made with AI? AI is everywhere, anyone can put images in AI and make “art.” I felt like I was looking at work for the eye as opposed to the soul. 

That is until I went home.

I saw images of Mazinani on Instagram laboring over the work. Cutting out with scissors paper printed images, with tape wrapped around her fingers to avoid getting pricked as she sticks each with a pin, one by one. This behind the scenes footage changes how I view the exhibition.

A work doesn’t need to be labour intensive to be impactful; we’ve all seen the blank canvases at galleries that people talk about for ages. But, seeing the efforts of a human did help me gain some perspective on how I can interpret the works in a way that is meaningful to me. I was perplexed at the time when she discussed the theme of labour as being an influence in the works. She discussed the floral patterns stuck with dressmaker pins relating to domesticity, and in contrast to the new kind of labour that AI has created. At the time of viewing I probably rolled my eyes (or at least mentally did)–sorry! I was certain this work was purely for aesthetic purposes, a commodity to be sold for thousands of dollars because of its looks, with only some afterthought of conceptual art. Now I see that the AI-centred final product acted as a way of dispelling and hiding the human labour behind it, thus discrediting Mazinani for her hard work. The beauty and inhumanely perfection obtained by AI made me lose sight of the process and person conducting and installing the work.

At the time, the dressmaker pins may have seemed insignificant, like the hook behind a frame. But really the pins are the visual expression of a person, a finger attempting to not get pricked. The pins are like a window into the impossible perspective.

AI has become a prevalent point of discussion when it comes to art and I for one have some mixed feelings about it. I can’t help but feel taken away from a piece of work when I find out AI was involved. My instinct is to repel it, to pine for something real, something human. In a painting, even when the strokes are so tiny, you would need a magnifying glass to distinguish them, we can feel impressed or envious by the person behind it. In a drawing, every smudge or line we can imagine the hand holding the pencil. In installation art, we know a person meticulously decided on the placement of an object. With video and photography, we can envision the person holding the camera. But with AI I feel compelled to believe it to be responsible for the decision making. Mazinani uses AI as a tool like Photoshop, something to edit and decipher with, but her hand has the final say, not the technology. When the camera first came out as a form of technology, people questioned its place in art as it changed the relationship with painting. Mazinani wanted to create what would have been impossible without digital culture, bringing together photographs from four different geographical landscapes combined together in one exhibition. I think part of the appeal with any given artwork is the humanness of it; I want to feel what they were feeling, I want expression. Mazinani’s exploration of AI in “An Impossible Perspective” for me was about the impossible perspective of the person conducting the AI, the hidden process that allows the viewer to see that there really is a person behind the work, not some robot.

             Sanaz Mazinani, All the Flowers, 2023.