Rob Gladstone: An Artificial Life

• Mon, Apr 1, 2024 - Tue, Apr 30, 2024  9am - 5pm On view

Artist Rob Gladstone presents An Artificial Life, an exhibition of ethereal new works on paper and collages on canvas, created at the intersection of the digital and tangible. The exhibition occupies the Bay 300 Gallery, at the east end of The Silos at Sawyer Yards studio building through April 30, 2024. 

Gladstone’s process is one of seeking the unexpected, the hard-to-pin-down, enigmatic, and elusive, surreality. By combining digital rendering methods with photography and printing, he arrives at a unique visual language that is technologically forward-thinking, while simultaneously referring back to analog methods, and purposefully undermining the smooth realism that digital imaging is designed to simulate. A storyteller by nature, Gladstone plays with reality, weaving together familiar stories from his imagination to create quietly charged visual scenarios. To achieve the soft, misty compositions presented in An Artifical Life, Gladstone begins on the computer in Blender, a 3D rendering software. Rather than rendering an image to completion, he uses an iphone to photograph it in the middle of the process. The resulting work is then printed with an inkjet printer onto watercolor paper.  

Gladstone’s journey into art-making began after several years of working as a stockbroker, head hunter, and eventually a filmmaker. While directing and producing his first of three independent films in the year 2000, he began using Blender and experimenting with new digital compositions. Since then, Gladstone has taken numerous painting and drawing classes at the Glassell School of Art, and now regularly combines traditional techniques and analog methods with his digital work. He works out of his studio, #209, at the Silos at Sawyer Yards.