Avery Singer

Avery Singer’s parents are both artists, and she grew up in a creative community. Fusing the tradition of painting with digital technologies, Singer builds and executes complex and theatrical images produced by hand using an airbrush. The initial stages of making take place inside 3D computer modelling software more often used by architects and designers. Singer’s recent works have become highly layered and abstracted, with the picture plane often compressed to near impenetrability. Happening, from an earlier series, features a clearer image, although it is still disorientating. A group of figures – assembled as geometric, articulated forms reminiscent of life drawing mannequins – leans towards an assemblage on a pedestal. The room they occupy is fractured by shadows. As the title suggests, the work can be read as a satire on the assumed power of an art object or art moment, specifically in the context of the history of experimental art in New York, but the painting also operates as a sincere homage to the importance of mystery and wonder.