Double Q Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by American artist Tim Irani (b. 1989), his first with the gallery. Drawing on elements of pop art and computer-generated imagery, Irani’s art engages with themes around life in the digital age. His practice focuses on the construction of seemingly simple yet complex works that combine digital renderings with traditional painting and woodworking techniques to create what he calls ‘structural paintings’. Requiring careful planning, each work is meticulously layered in order to achieve the colours seen in the digital realm of pixels.
Irani graduated with a degree in architecture from the University of San Francisco. Together with a deep interest in nature and technology since childhood, he began to create works that explore the relationship between two distinct worlds – the natural and the virtual. Seeking to document technology’s integration into living systems, Irani’s work investigates visual similarities between technological objects and the natural world. In Red Object Macrochip (2023), for example, he observes how a computer circuit board can resemble a landscape drawing plan for a formal garden. Both frightened and captivated by what the future holds, the artist brings to life a playful world where nature and technology coexist in careful balance.
I like to think of circuit boards as being little electrical gardens, similar to a landscape drawing plan view. Shared shapes, pathways, and channels often taking on similar forms in the name of efficiency.
— Tim Irani
For this new body of work, titled ‘The Object’, Irani took as his inspiration the colourful, intricate paintings of jungles and wild animals by the French post-Impressionist artist Henri Rousseau. The title of the exhibition might even be understood as a film title, as the individual artworks tell a story in much the same way as the frames of a film. In this imaginary tale, the protagonist is a tiger who is exploring the jungle and stumbles upon an industrial object – a valve – which closely resembles a flower. This moment represents the tiger’s first encounter with a technological object and is meant to provide commentary on how human beings are starting to resemble the tiger. The path the tiger treads in the exhibition is a symbolic journey that encompasses a variety of sensations, such as fear, confusion, excitement, and the joy of discovery. These sensations appear in the individual works, which at the same time recount a narrative that illustrates the phenomenon of information technology in the 21st century.
Amidst increasingly rapid technological advances in today’s digitally driven world, ‘The Object’ is a continuation of Irani’s ongoing exploration of the human obsession with the potential of new technology to optimise our lived experience. We are frequently discovering new tools that may initially seem frightening or exciting, even though at some point these same tools soon become mundane aspects of everyday life. In Predator (2023), Irani depicts the conflict between humans and technology to show the vast environmental impact of technology. This work was inspired by Tiger Attacked by a Snake (1953), a painting by Italian artist Antonio Ligabue who is known for his lively, expressive portrayals of animals engaged in a fight for survival. Viewing his work as a tangible representation of our current digitally augmented reality, Irani is fascinated with looking at ways to explore the contemporary reality of living with technology.