Future People (2024)
Like most of my work, this piece is based on "found" images which I recontextualized so as to play around with their original meanings. In this case however, the found elements weren't exactly images -- they were stock figures from a 3D modelling software called "Poser." The idea in Poser was (and still is) to take digital mannequins and pose them for use in digital illustration or as reference for drawing comics or other traditional media illustrations.
For my purposes, I wanted to put the default Poser man and woman next to each other and then load the various standard stock "poses" for them in Poser's library - to see if any unexpected combinations would emerge. Mostly the results were pretty prosaic, but once in a while they were interesting enough to use. I made nine images this way in the mid-1990's.
Late last year I revisited one of these pieces and ran it through a number of "painterly" filters in Photoshop to make it look less mechanical (I'm aware of the irony there) -- and also to bring out the flat landscape inherent in the liminal cgi background of the older versions (being from Manitoba, I have a soft spot for flat landscapes).
Although I "warmed" the image up with the old-timey paint effects, I wanted to push ahead with the spooky futurism of their anti-gravity swimdance -- so I so I was quite happy when Photoshop's algorithm balked at rendering any naughty bits!