Hannah Catanzaro

My name is Hannah, and I am a fourthyear student at the University of Guelph with a major in studio art and a minor in art history. My work aims to capture the technological world and internet culture through paint. Often, my art is used to critique and relate art conventions and art history to digital landscapes. This practice stems from the impulse to document fleeting digital phenomena that may be erased by technological advances.

The digital images presented in the medium of paint creates a humorous meta-narrative involving the viewer and the image. I have dubbed this genre of art Cyber Pop Art, and I hope that these pieces can become a catalyst to modern-day pop art. I am very inspired by the work of American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein.

The piece Untitled - Paint is a critique of painting and photography in the form of an old Windows XP laptop. The painting depicts the classic windows desktop photograph Bliss being obscured by the open Paint software window. Within the painting window is an abstract painting form. This is nostalgic for kids from the early 2000s, as it was common for children to scribble within the paint application and then fill the lines in with color using the paint bucket tool.

Forged Painting is a meta painting replicated from a screenshot from the video game Animal Crossing Wild World (2005) on the Nintendo DS. Within the game, the player may purchase paintings that are duplicates of paintings from real-life art historical canon. For instance, the player may purchase paintings such as Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La. When purchasing these works, the player must decipher if the painting is the original or a forgery by identifying the discrepancies of the painting. If the player buys a forged work and tries to sell it to the shopkeepers, the player will be presented with the text “This is a forged painting!... forged!”

Forged Painting, acrylic paint on canvas, 2020

Q. HOW DOES UNTITLED - PAINT ACT AS A CRITIQUE OF PAINTING AND PHOTOGRAPHY?

Untitled - Paint, acrylic paint on canvas, 2020

A: This painting was for an assignment in my Painting II class. The assignment was called "photo fail," and the goal was to capture photography through paint. Untitled - Paint acts as a critique of painting because the imagery of the Microsoft Paint software is obstructing the view of the desktop photograph, bringing up the debate of "did photography kill painting?" At the same time, the image stems from a screenshot of the Microsoft Paint software, relying on photography. This shows the important and complicated relationship between photography and paint. Photography aids the production of painted images, and painting was the basis for photography as an art form. Both mediums are important in the art space. Photography did not ruin painting as a medium, rather, painting was improved using photography with artists being able to paint from photographs. Q. I) WHAT WAS THE MOTIVATION BEHIND CREATING FORGED PAINTING? II) WHAT MESSAGE ARE YOU TRYING TO CONVEY WITH THIS PAINTING?

A: The motivation for painting Forged Painting was to capture pixels and polygons on screens through paint. I painted in squares to capture the illusion of pixels on a canvas. This is similar to Roy Lichtenstein's use of the Ben Day dots in his comic book paintings. I like to think that painting video game screens is a modern-day version of painting from comic book sources.

The message I wanted to convey is presented through the text. For instance, the text reads "This is a forged painting!... forged!," referring to not only the in-game painting but to the painting I created of them. The painting is forged in the sense that the contents of the image are not mine and I did not invent these characters. At the same time, this is a screenshot that I took from my personal Animal Crossing game, and my character was designed by myself. Overall, this painting captures the blurred lines of the ownership of images.