_Bio Trained as an architect, cultural analyst and scientist at the University of Toronto, Ryerson University and McGill University respectively, Lianne Ho is an artist with a burgeoning practice. Having first shown at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in 2002, Distorted Political Spheres marks the renaissance of her artistic career.
_Approach Lianne Ho’s practice currently deals with themes of simulation and reality. Specific topics pertaining to this binary include: (1) the fictions of the monetary system, such as the speculative, unreal aspects of credit, the stock market and global currency, and (2) the distorted political climate as a result of digital platforms such as Twitter, Facebook. The internet and related digital technologies have played a major role in determining those who occupy seats of power. — This exploration began by posing the question, what does pictorial space look like today? The representation of space is highly inflected by the digital milieu, and our understanding of space through digital avenues is largely discordant from our understanding of space in the flesh. The result of this exploration is an archiving of the disjuncture and interplay between the propositions of the real and the digital, a reified metaphor for the condition of politics today.
_Project This series is an illustration and a statement about how our current condition is one in which the real and the distorted digital interact, with serious irrevocable consequences. It examines the disjuncture between real, found, photographic representations and their digital 3D model representations of political monuments. It does so by recording on film a process of morphing the former representation into the latter to underscore their difference. The in-between image is printed, and then traced onto canvas. These paintings are a record, an archiving of an intermediary state of metamorphosis. The technique emphasizes the interplay between the real and the digital, as well as the mercurial and elusive nature of the truth in a world with propositions of both the real and the virtual. The paintings are illustrations of our current contemporary condition, one in which our tangible reality is inflected by the pervasiveness of the immaterial and largely unregulated digital medium.