BOB BICKNELL-KNIGHT

Nothing To Fear II, 2021
3D printed PLA plastic, wooden pallets
85 x 120 x 120 cm

As part of a body of work concerning digital personas and performing for social media, between 2018 – 2022 Bicknell-Knight produced fictional photographs of art studios, with his own works embedded within these faux spaces. The images were posted to the social networking site Instagram, creating a digital persona of a painter, with many posts receiving hundreds of likes. Within the age of social media, Bicknell-Knight is questioning these performative spaces and the relationship between our online and offline selves, through the lens of one of the more traditional artistic mediums.

The physical artworks translate the digital studio spaces into the physical realm, with the titles referencing the dates that the original images were posted to Instagram. They are hybrid paintings. The pieces begin as digitally edited fabricated images. They are then printed onto canvas, stretched and then painted onto with acrylic paint, with the offline artist’s hand interacting with the original online digital image. The sides are colour matched, and the front of the canvas is partially painted onto.

The series somewhat culminated in a residency at Hybrida Artist in Residence in Älvsbacka, Sweden in 2021.

Nothing To Fear II (2021) was a sculptural installation that accompanied the painterly works, made up of 3D printed sculptures of tools and materials commonly found within a painter’s studio. The original objects, paint tubes, brushes and an ash tray, were 3D scanned before being 3D printed in transparent filament, mimicking the journey of digital to physical that the 2D works would undergo and the often less-than-transparent ways that people operate on social media platforms.

Nothing To Fear II has been included in the following exhibitions:

– Moisture Technē. At Älvsbacka, Molkom, SE, 6th – 19th August 2021.