Daughters of Mercury Kickstarter

 

Daughters of Mercury

I'm running a Kickstarter until October 26 asking for your support painting a series of full-length oil portraits of trans women, that transcend their conventional depictions in art and media. Rewards include wall calendars, prints, and original paintings. Click above to view a preview or support after Sunday, September 21. If we don't reach the goal, I can't pay the models, cover travel costs, or pay for my time and materials, so I won't make art. If you can't spare, share. Thank you!

Teleportraiture

(FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 4/9/2012)
by Janet Bruesselbach
teleportraiture.com
Exhibition May 18-31, 2012
Opening Reception Friday, May 18^th, 7-9pm
Space Womb Gallery
22-48 Jackson Ave.
Long Island City, NY 11101

Teleportraiture is a series of small, intimate oil portraits, painted from live poses, by remote video chat, via Skype, Google Hangout, or iChat. Janet Bruesselbach launched Teleportraiture in 2011 as a Kickstarter campaign.  The subject of each portrait is a backer of the campaign, or a loved one volunteered by the backer.

Janet is pleased to announce that the 45 resulting paintings, completed between October 2011 and February 2012, will be displayed in a 2-week gallery exhibition in New York City, in downtown Long Island City, to be more precise.  Attendance at the opening reception on Friday, May 18^th, will also be possible remotely through a simultaneous online video chat.

The pricing and experimentalism of the series made the fine art portrait experience open to people who had never before considered commissioning one. The subjects include the artist’s friends and relatives as well as people met only through the campaign, and only online.  Some posed from the other side of the world, others from the same room, all framed by their computer screens. The ages of subjects ranged from under a year old to septuagenarian.  Many subjects had never used video chat before.  The project reflects a moment when a flexible technology is still finding its social niche.

Janet has been working as a portrait artist since she was 15, and was further trained at RISD and the New York Academy of Art.  Her painting is traditional but fresh and lively, and feeds on the energy of interaction with a live subject.  Paintings reflect on both the artist’s personality and her subjects’.  Yet as artifacts of sittings, they are not quite realistic, and often contain traces of awkwardness in every level of communication.

Some of the portraits remain available for purchase, as are a limited number of catalogs.  The artist will be working in the gallery and will be available for live video chat Monday (21, 29), Tuesday (22, 30), and Thursday (24), from 12-6pm EST.  The gallery is also open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, 12-6pm.  To commission a portrait during this or another time, to schedule a viewing, and for any other inquiries, contact: janet@bruesselbach.com (310) 617-3366

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Teleportraiture

Kickstarter approved my project!



Teleportraiture is a series of oil portraits painted through videochat. I am an accomplished portrait artist whose work has always been based around the intimacy generated during the interaction between painter and subject. The painting is artifact of a performance of relationship and conversation, mutual but asymmetrical observation. Often I describe things like the mirror effect where I have to put the expression on my face that my subject should have in the painting. The outcome is the result of a face moving through time, capturing a personality, and particularly a personality in interaction with my own.
I’ve grown up on the internet, and in the past few years interacting remotely in this same facial, visual and vocal way has become commonplace. In videochat, the mirror effect is more explicit, as you’re always able to see yourself as the other sees you. You find yourself having to alter your face from the way people look at computers to how they look at people – yet the portrait artist often looks at people the way people look at computers.
This project seeks to examine the strange intimacy and changed emotions around communicating remotely by making the archaic oil portraiture tradition site-unspecific and international in a way that, if anything, makes it more personalized. This differentiates it from the portrait-by-photo services made affordable by outsourcing. The ultimate images use the intermediary camera and compression to generate artifact artifacts. They are not supposed to look like they were done in person, but reflect their particular system of old and new technologies.
I have worked this way on two occasions: once with deep romance, and once with a complete stranger speaking another language, on chatroulette, where most other video screens showed penises. Thus this project examines the current trend toward erosion of online anonymity.
The donor structure is based around other donors being able to sit in and watch the process, and, with the permission of the subjects, will be recorded. Higher donations are given private sessions, and there’s plenty to be had if one is shy. A lower donation will allow posing without buying the painting. The intent is to continue to make these after the project funded through kickstarter is fulfilled.
I’m aiming to complete 20-30 paintings through this project and exhibit them. Guests will be able to attend the exhibit remotely.