Gail Dawson
Austin, Texas

My work is figurative; my interests, visual; my concerns, the interference of media with images, and time and motion. I work between mediums, translating video to paintings and drawings and paintings and drawings to video.

I work from a television monitor which combines the challenge of working from life and working from a photograph. I concentrate on capturing the specific qualities of electronic color and transmissive light; dividing mimesis between a description of the image and its format. The painted and drawn images retain a recognizable reference to their original technological format. Unlike a television monitor, however, their surfaces are open and worked. Touch and vision are linked; the optical experience of video becomes tactile – a material equivalent of video distortion.

The circle is complete when I digitize the paintings and drawings and edit them into brief video clips, where 30 frames equal one second. Thirty paintings represent one second of video. As videos, time compresses multiple paintings into the tiny space of a monitor. The viewer stands in front of the monitor, subject to the whims of the editor to see images. Seen as paintings outside the video, they occupy space, and require a different kind of time to be viewed – a traditional, more contemplative looking where the viewer is the editor and decides which images are seen and for how long.

The result is work that unites a newer way of seeing images with a traditional way of making them. My hope is that the viewer moves from a position of consumption of images to one of contemplation of them.