Michael Batty and Chris Shier: The Moth and the Flame

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Michael Batty and Chris Shier, "The Moth and the Flame"

Please join us for our opening reception: Thursday, February 16th, 6-9 pm  

The Moth and the Flame explores the Internet Art concern around formal language and its linear relationship to painting in a new modern era. There is a clear connection between Shier’s moving trochoidal images and geometric Penrose tiles and Michael Batty’s large-scale paintings of an interconnected lattice and tumbling darts.

Batty uses these two styles to contrast the kinetics of stasis and motion. The first is a latticed work that evokes the charged presence of a quantum shimmer compared with the colourful tumbling darts beholden to Newtonian parameters. Both have movement but one is characteristically familiar and the other notably discreet.

This quantum/Newtonian paradox is held within each moving image created by Shier. Pixelated micro-movement describes the postural changes of the algorithm for the digitally generated effect. Differing scales of movement draw the viewer to observe painting's metaphorical rendering and the digital platform's demonstration of the photoelectric effect.

Michael Batty graduated from Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver in 1989 with a major in painting. He has attended the renowned artist workshops in Emma Lake, Saskatchewan under the tutelage of the likes of Anthony Caro, William Perehudoff and Dorothy Knowles. He also studied printmaking at The Art Institute at Capilano College in Vancouver. Batty’s paintings can be found in collections around the world, including the Waldorf Astoria in Beijing, China, W Guangzhou, China, Four Seasons, Dubai, UAE, and Bank of Montreal in Calgary and Toronto, among many others.

Chris Shier lives and works in Vancouver BC. He began producing gifs in 2010 as part of the Dump.fmnet art community before pursuing interactive and code-based animation. Available primarily online, his work uses feedback effects and offset loops to create non-repeating, mutating forms. It is his hope to rekindle some of the creative spirit of the pre-corporatized internet. He has been shown at Centre Pompidou, Vancouver Art Gallery, 319 Scholes, and Western Front, also the digital galleries Electric Objects, NewHive, The Wrong Biennale, ANI GIF, and Parallelograms. He has also produced sites for MGMT, Animal Collective, MTV, and most recently, The New Pornographers.