There’s a lot of gushing liquid in Katie Torn’s work, but since this is digital art we’re talking about, there’s no real danger of getting wet. There are also a number of disembodied heads, bobbing like oil derricks; a small platoon of My Little Pony figurines; and chaotic still life compositions that double as abstracted bodies. Torn’s vision, as seen through the four prints and two animations included in the exhibition, is colorful yet bleak, with a certain post-apocalyptic playfulness. Using the computer program Maya, along with a handful of others (like Poser and Zbrush), Torn is able to integrate elements of actual, purpose-built sets with purely fantastic objects created digitally. The artist conceives of it all as “virtual sculpture,” despite the fact that it’s experienced in the form of flat images on a panel or monitor.
The 32-year-old artist — most recently an Eyebeam Fellow, where she co-curated this year’s stellar “New Romantics” exhibition of digitally focused art — is set to unveil “The End of Flutter Valley” at Portland’s Upfor Gallery, opening July 3 and on view through August 2. (Her print “Aunt Lizzie” is also included as one of the sole two-dimensional works in the current survey at Postmasters, “This is what sculpture looks like.”) A turning point for Torn came when she was a student of the artist Claudia Hart, who introduced her to technology that could render digital animation in a way that generated effects more unnerving than Pixar films. “It had such a plastic feeling to it,” she said, complimentarily, of Hart’s aesthetic. It’s a feeling she’s built on in her own work: pieces like “Monument,” 2011, in which the virtual camera pans on a wild-haired mannequin form, her eyes vomiting streams of liquid; or “The Calm Before The Storm,” 2012, which depicts a hellish fantasy island composed of everyday detritus, the whole architectural mess topped by a female head sporting Ziggy Stardust-worthy makeup. (“Even if it’s a human,” Torn said, “I like it to be half-human, half-plastic.”) The soundtrack in both works is a spare, haunting wash of wind and desolation. “I always think of those scenes in Fellini,” the artist explained of the aural inspiration, “the moments on a beach, where the person is totally alone, and it switches from ‘everyday’ to ‘surreal.’”
For the accompanying prints, Torn is often looking to painting, both as a reference — Kandinsky’s gestures for one recent work, she said, or Yves Tenguy’s biomorphic forms — and an end goal (the “physical presence” achieved by how mounting the prints on aluminum over wood, which makes them look like “a painting on masonite.”) The pieces are the result of an intricate movement between the two- and three-dimensional, and between various media: An inspiration from a painting, recast as a three-dimensional virtual object in Maya, and then “photographed” within the program to create a two-dimensional print. And while they’re often still lifes of inanimate objects, they also double as portraits of a sort, like “Sleeping Beauty,” 2012, which nearly has a head, limbs, a heart, and blood (even if those roles are filled by a fake flower, pipes, a metal blob, and a variety of hot pink Kool-Aid, respectively). It’s this state of uncomfortable in-betweenness that makes Torn’s images fascinating, examining a world that seems to be simultaneously alive and dead — a lonely junk universe, an array of monuments to a civilization that killed itself. “It seduces,” Torn said of her work overall, “but then it’s toxic.”
