Conor Backman

My recent paintings continue an ongoing interest in representation, reproduction, origin, and iteration. The work explores the spaces between material and simulated states through a layering of references, formats, and fidelities.

Like a concrete poem, where form mimics content, the works often employ a combination of images and objects that refer to their own structure and making, and to inherent problems and long-standing tropes of representational painting.

I attempt to balance a disparate range of materials, techniques, and external sources, to create work that can occupy multiple states simultaneously. For example, a cast orange peel might function as a monochrome painting, the idea of immaterial orange color, or an analog to the task of the cartographer. In doing so, I’m interested in pointing towards an underlying instability, which, while bolstered by ongoing developments in digital technology, has always been inherent to the relationship between object and image.