New exhibit mixes Old Masters with elements of Photoshop
FRAGILE EGO, Digital Collage by Wendy Seller, showing at the Bannister Gallery
Bill Van Siclen: bvaniscl@providencejournal.com
A longtime professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, Seller has a knack for mixing images drawn from the dusty vaults of art and architectural history with cutting-edge digital-imaging and photo-editing software. The results, which suggest a mash-up of Old Master painting and 21st-century technology — Michelangelo-meets-Macintosh — are weirdly fascinating but also a little disturbing.
That’s especially true of a series of women’s portraits, in which images drawn from North Renaissance art are sampled and scrambled through the digital magic of Photoshop.
Detached from their original context, and sporting the slightly pixilated look of video-game characters, they look at once mysterious and a little bedraggled — like jet-lagged visitors from another era.