Poetics in Colour (For Your Eyes Only)

Abstract

The way in which we encounter imagery continues to change with each new technology. From etchings to billboards, mobile photography to digital editing software, the materiality of colour is utterly transformed. Poetics in Colour (For Your Eyes Only) is a meditation on the subjectivity of colour across physical and digital mediums. In this essay, Ria Czerniak-LeBov explores glitch, process, synaesthesia and affect as she contextualises recent developments within her printmaking practice. Here, she revisits the simple tech failure which marked a departure from her signature monochromatic palette, leading Ria to re-evaluate her relationship and interactions with colour across contemporary visual culture.

As the artist traverses these technologies, imagery and colour are transformed from pigment to light, CMYK to RGB, from print to screen and back again. These images are not an attempt at faithful reproduction. Rather, they are musings on fidelity and singularity. These works acknowledge our entanglement within the physical, virtual and digital worlds we inhabit. The nature and quality of our engagement with colour is contingent upon the medium through which it reaches us. Do not adjust your screens. These interfaces are almost as unique as the eyes that gaze upon them. Whatever way these colours reach your rods and cones is yours, and yours alone.