Chris Horner.
Bio
Chris Horner is a Portland-based digital artist focusing on appropriation-based collage. He is self-taught, and has been developing and refining his distinctive style over the past decade, gradually incorporating more advanced and elaborate technological elements as they become available. In this way, his work aims to keep pace with the current cultural-technological conversation.
Beginning with digital photography in the mid 2000s, during his time living in Silicon Valley, he depicted the absurdity of the world he found himself in. Eventually, finding photography alone limiting and unequal to the task, he began utilizing various software to take his compositions beyond the capabilities of the camera. In recent years he has begun to integrate certain artificial intelligence based programs into the work as well, further blurring the line between what is and is not "real", what we can and cannot trust.
Horner’s work has been published in arts magazines (Heads, Lazy Oaf, Broad), and exhibited in galleries in Portland (Ford Gallery, Video is the Future) and San Francisco (Get High on Mountains). In 2021 he was the recipient of the New Futures award provided by Saatchi Art, and was awarded the Fair Director’s Pick at The Other Art Fair in Los Angeles.
Artist Statement
My work focuses on the contemporary media landscape, and the overwhelming visual chaos of information that we are inundated with on a daily basis. I’m fascinated by the nature of information in our current culture. Information has never been more readily available and accessible, and yet we are perhaps less-informed than we’ve ever been.
Information used to be rare, delivered to us by expert sources, and for the most part, blindly trusted. The internet changed this of course–today we find ourselves lost in a dense fog of information (and misinformation) coming at us from all sides. We are smothered in the data dump. Truth, if it does exist, is lost in the noise. Given the overabundance of data, it becomes easier and easier to simply trust what echoes your pre-existing beliefs, and doubt what challenges you. Doubt, ultimately, becomes the universal experience of modern existence–we have been lied to, we have been fooled, and we have overcompensated by doubting nearly everything. This is our means of defense, of self-preservation.
My pallet, my materials, are our shared culture of images. I collect everything, tens of thousands of downloaded images, cell phone screenshots, photographs of television screens, sensational headlines, tweets, lyrics, celebrities, advertisements and quotes, decoupled from context and meaning, and reconstituted into a sublime visual chaos. By appropriating the familiar images of our shared experience and modifying them, perverting them, denaturing them and then building them back up, sometimes by hand and sometimes with the aid of artificial intelligence-based software, my intention is to create compositions that look the way that being in the world feels–a netart phantasmagoria in which nothing can be trusted and everything is suspect.
These digital works are then rendered physically on canvas, acrylic, aluminum, or presented on monitor screens–replicating the appearance of the source from which they were culled.
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Chris Horner.
My work focuses on the contemporary media landscape, and the overwhelming visual chaos of information that we are inundated with on a daily basis. I’m fascinated by the nature of information in our current culture. Information has never been more readily available and accessible, and yet we are perhaps less-informed than we’ve ever been.
Information used to be rare, delivered to us by expert sources, and for the most part, blindly trusted. The internet changed this of course–today we find ourselves lost in a dense fog of information (and misinformation) coming at us from all sides. We are smothered in the data dump. Truth, if it does exist, is lost in the noise. Given the overabundance of data, it becomes easier and easier to simply trust what echoes your pre-existing beliefs, and doubt what challenges you. Doubt, ultimately, becomes the universal experience of modern existence–we have been lied to, we have been fooled, and we have overcompensated by doubting nearly everything. This is our means of defense, of self-preservation.
My pallet, my materials, are our shared culture of images. I collect everything, tens of thousands of downloaded images, cell phone screenshots, photographs of television screens, sensational headlines, tweets, lyrics, celebrities, advertisements and quotes, decoupled from context and meaning, and reconstituted into a sublime visual chaos. By appropriating the familiar images of our shared experience and modifying them, perverting them, denaturing them and then building them back up, sometimes by hand and sometimes with the aid of artificial intelligence-based software, my intention is to create compositions that look the way that being in the world feels–a netart phantasmagoria in which nothing can be trusted and everything is suspect.
These digital works are then rendered physically on canvas, acrylic, aluminum, or presented on monitor screens–replicating the appearance of the source from which they were culled.
