Alexandra Jonscher is an American-Australian artist based in Sydney, NSW working in
abstraction and post-digital painting practices. Her work integrates digital technology into her
painting practice, utilising software for brushes and digital media as her palette. Jonscher’s
painting practice is rooted in expressive, gestural abstraction with an interest in language
and mark-making, often meditating on the subtle difference between a scribble and a sign.
Her work reflects on the state of post-truth and the uncanny tension between simulation and
reality in the digital age.
Apparitions is a presentation of installation, wall objects and paintings marking two years of
dialogue between Jonscher and an AI generative-imaging software. Jonscher has been in
active dialogue with the AI software, employing it as a collaborator in her painting practice.
She prompts the AI with gibberish words and problematic phrases as an ‘abstract prompting’
method that behaves like an abstract, mark-making practice, in that she doesn’t know where
these prompts will lead. Her prompting process results in sequences of random images that
range from artificial landscapes, objects, abstractions, and figures. Jonscher responds to this
imagery as an abstract artist, using the generated images as a digital painting palette that
results in disorientating layered, abstractions in diverse media that make tangible what is
innately artificial.
Jonscher’s work seeks to make sense of the chaotic cacophony of artificial AI slop by inviting
viewers to interrogate her layered use of media and decipher between what is human, and
what is machine. Utilising industrial signage printing and fabrication technologies, the
innately human touch of her painterly gestures is flattened, reproduced and recontextualised,
yo-yoing between physical and digital reality. Her work disturbs this coded software with a
human sense of intuition and chaos, creating body of work that is as off kilter and uncanny
as the AI’s ability to mimic human intelligence. In an age where our exposure to information,
images and media is at odds with what is real and true, these artworks become odes to the
uncanny simulation of life in the digital age and reflect on how we project, decipher, and
interpret meaning in this landscape.