Electronic Paintings

Wired explorations using arduino coding technology, enabled John Fairfull to give an eerie sense of life to these black paintings. 

2015

Installation process shot, Part Two, Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2015.

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Purple Lights

An eerie sound of flickering ticks would be produced from the coded LED lights shutting off and on. An empty decaying house falls apart. The viewer catches it amidst it's internal destruction, as if the building holds itself in its fragility to be exposed. 

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Pulse

Echos of life are found printed in newspapers. Their pages are torn and mass produced, left here to slowly yellow and age. As time passes, it's measured by these forgotten electric "heart beats". The programmed lights cast a soft yellow glow under wax. Almost as warm as the they colors produced, yet the wax holds itself and never melts. This piece offers subtle tensions between real, and false, inanimate, and living, soft and hard, warm and cold. It leaves you continuously watching and welcomed by it's glow, mesmerized like a moth to its flame.

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"Pure Economic Reason"

A false promise is left plugged into the wall. The painting is charged but there are no actions, no life given to its workings. The words "Pure Economic Reason" are stitched onto its surface like a spine, using the old technology of morse code. The viewer fills its empty body with moments of slight hope. Flares of reflected light are caught on its wires. The dull ticks of sound fill themselves in the room like soft fog, and the viewer does not mind to stay watching; their eyes catch on the manipulated surface of the canvas. The paint's application is as structured as the programming itself. Rigid and on display, the paint even shines in contrast to where it's matte.

John Fairfull, Part Two, Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2015.

Exhibition review written by, Kim F. Watson, 2017.