IAN MALHOTRA

Ian Malhotra's work explores the transmission and translation of visual information, often mimicking digital methods of reproduction through laborious analogue processes. The imagery he works with is natural elements in constant flux; skies, mountains, oceans and moving landscapes. These are chosen not just for their unsuitability to binary simulation, but also their importance in the history of picture making.

A Week of Midnight depicts a series of midnight skies drawn from video games - each captured at exactly 23:59 in the game time, on the corresponding real-world day. The choice of copper-plate etching references the historical art production, and reproduction, of landscape imagery using printmaking for wider consumption. However, in this case the world affords these romantic ideals to territory that never existed in the physical world. To further subvert this established language, Malhotra reverses the typical tonal construction of etchings by using white ink on black paper, a nod to the light on a black screen that underpins the relentless digital images we see today.

Each of the vertical lines are drawn onto the plate by hand, before the night sky is etched in layers of painted acid. Combating the substrate of vertical lines with gestural marks, Malhotra creates tones through unique variation in each continuous line. In doing so, he rails against the binary structure that underpins so much of our society, and reasserts the complex, fluid, human process of seeing and creating, present even within what initially looks like a mechanically produced image.

Website: https://www.ianmalhotra.com/