Ann Morgan

I’ve spent most of my personal and professional life virtually: Developing websites, playing video games, text-only friendships with people who might not exist. Post-pandemic, living digitally through screens is central to the shared human experience. I start from this new reality to create large-scale landscapes in oil paint. My current work draws from images I prompt from an AI model trained on my own photos and friends’ social media images they have shared. I use Photoshop and several AI platforms to manipulate and play until I have my own digital version of what lies outside. I use AI as a form of automatism, accessing the material from my own past work. Working backwards from traditional landscape painting, I make my digital image mashups into large physical objects only experienced fully in real life. The heroic landscape painting, in history, is a depiction of an ideal world with ties to the reality of nature – my idealized reality is virtual.