Stump Gallery is pleased to present This is Not the Signal, a presentation of new work by Amber Wynne-Jones, Nicholas Ray Steele, Owen McCallum-Keeler, and Ahmed Ahmed. Each artist works with different mediums, subjects, and thematic content, but their work converges around similar questions: How can representational art traditions better reflect the fractured, hyper-mediated interiority of today’s digital native? How might painting map modern life? In an age when the self is increasingly constructed through algorithms and avatars, can we reignite some of the psychoanalytic spark that burned through last century’s figurative art? Can we find new forms for new neuroses?
In Wynne-Jones’s paintings, human figures contort and shift, limbs and faces dissolving into pure abstraction and pattern. McCallum-Keeler’s individuals similarly conflate figure and ground, imaging the modern subject as rhythmic tesserae—every line evoking the raw recursive logic of cyberspace. Ahmed’s subjects drift across an uncanny metaverse of pop-cultural residue, their interactions hovering between the comic and the quietly sinister. Steele’s paintings drip with a more subdued dread: eerily impassive children and affectless animals flatly rendered, caught in moments of palpable unease. Together, the works on display in This is Not the Signal suggest that figuration today is about distortion, not depiction. Instead of stable narratives or easily legible themes, the artists in This is Not the Signal probe the slippage between self and simulation, memory and meme, interiority and interface. In doing so, they attempt to summon a truly contemporary mode of representational art—one attuned not to consensus reality, but to individuated illusion—the warped, flickering consciousness of our time.
Text by George Sutton.