Julia Keenan Untitled , 2026 Oil, pencil, and watercolour on canvas In Untitled , Julia Keenan bridges her signature exploration of the "exhausted image" with a poignant look at post-digital isolation. Suspended within a clinical, screen-like white void, a rigid, hard-edged machine encounters a crisis of purpose, experiencing a messy, deeply human state of confusion. Rather than framing technology as purely cold or alienating, Keenan forces human vulnerability directly into the machine's geometric architecture, rendering its severe frame in dense, heavy layers of oil paint. Standing in an equal, balanced stance alongside this mechanical anxiety is a stylized flower—a direct nod to the spiritual and cosmic iconography of early 20th-century pioneer Hilma af Klint . Handled in a delicate wash of watercolour and fine pencil lines, the flower introduces an ethereal frequency of organic intuition to counter the machine's systemic logic. Bound together by a harmonious, sy...
I am a post-digital visual artist whose practice investigates the "exhausted image"—the site where digital data and physical reality dissolve. My work has evolved from large-scale installations at Aspex Gallery (2019) to a recent, intensive shift into traditional oil painting. I operate within a "Closed Loop" system: I generate digital GIFs on social media, let them become "exhausted" by the algorithm, and then manually "resurrect" them through the slow, haptic process of oil on loose canvas. My work is grounded in Radical Vulnerability . By abandoning traditional frames for raw-edged, "chimera-shaped" skins, I expose the fragility of our mediated reality. This "Manual Render" replaces digital latency with material slowness, reclaiming the human remnant from the relentless speed of the screen. My practice has been recognised by Tate Modern , Shanghai Museum of Glass , and ArtFacts , where I am ranked in the top 100,000 glob...