How do you remember your childhood? Are your memories all crystal clear and tangible, or fuzzy and ungraspable?
The latter, probably. Because that’s how memory works. Especially for young artist and musician Jack Warne. His paintings here are all digital haze and glitching fog, smudges and unrecognisable forms. Their surface is fragmented, striated, pitted, textured. They’re like looking out of a fogged- up window, or staring through gauze.
Which makes sense because Warne suffers from episodes of temporary blindness, the result of a rare genetic condition. So the works here – filled with nods to childhood snapshots and home movies – are like visions of the past that just can’t seem to coalesce into reality.
Each painting comes with its own augmented reality Instagram filter, activated by a QR code. Through your phone, the paintings start to move, but they still don’t become clear. Now they stutter and strobe, the images flickering, glitching and disappearing. Is that a car, a rose, a face? It all stays uncomfortably, frustratingly out of reach. The AR feels like a desperate attempt to find clarity in all this visual static, but one doomed to always fail.
The poems dotted around the space feel a little tacked on, and the QR code business is a bit unwieldy and distracting. But as paintings of a foggy past, as visual attempts at grasping meaning out of the fog of memory, they’re brilliantly eye opening.
