Darcy Gerbarg Exhibition

At this one-woman exhibition, in addition to seeing Gerbarg’s artworks on canvas, participants have the opportunity to walk around and take snapshots in some of her AR Enhanced Paintings. For those who wish to travel into Gerbarg’s virtual reality environments, 3DVR goggles will also be available.

Gerbarg chooses to exploit the functionality of computer graphics software and digital image-making tools, so one might think, at first, to place her work somewhere in the art and technology genre. But no, on closer look, her work doesn’t have the tight, hard edge, repetitive strokes, or randomly generated, mathematically created, or geometric imagery. And while she is working in a 3D virtual environment to create the colorful paint strokes seen in her paintings and prints, she isn’t just interested in creating immersive environments or video games. Instead, Gerbarg combines whimsical, expressive gestures in explosions of color, from nature and the built environment, with a variety of digital imaging techniques, drawn from her broad repertoire of these tools, to make appealing, human-scale paintings.

And here’s the conundrum, the paintings are created in a virtual world, in full 3D, but then digitally translated, manipulated, and printed by a large-scale printer onto canvas for traditional stretching and framing. The human hand and body performed the physical gestures that created the brush strokes in colored light, but while Gerbarg made all the choices and decisions, controlling the entire process, every step, right through to the printing, was digital. Gerbarg delights in her use of digital technology as much as she chuckles at how cartoon-like some of the oversize detailed brush strokes appear on canvas. Gerbarg thinks of these pieces as Paintings on Canvas, but what are these pictures?