Wayne Toepp

Region: Northeast

This body of work engages the twin notions of watching and being watched. I am examining images collected from the continual data stream of the expanding security environment that we move through in our daily comings and goings.

I attempt to remain faithful to the bland neutrality of the captured video image as I work with it in the studio. While the process of rendering the greatly enlarged images in oil paint is keyed to this neutral opticality, there is an inexorable quality of seductive beauty in the surveillance source images themselves that becomes explicit on the painted surface. The paintings function as screens on which the momentary appearance of people in various public spaces is recorded.

If art is a process of pointing, it must register and account for that which it is pointing toward. I have chosen to examine, at some length, images culled from actual surveillance video because I would like the viewer to register both the disintegration of privacy and the implications of surveillance technology in the current political climate.