Background:
IMPRESSIONS is a blog that features new artwork made under the guise of other artists without their advice or pre-existing consent. Based on open information available about the artist through their Internet presence, I internalize a pattern to make work using his or her interests and visuals instead of my own. Each post is intended to be a gift of intellectual property for the artist who inspired the work, encouraging them to claim ownership over the image I made.

Statement:
The intention of IMPRESSIONS is to present the idea of artistic brands as malleable and separate from human identities. To assume the role of an artist is to become an avatar of yourself; it is the creation of a brand with an identical name that is inevitably separate from the real you. The artist brand is required to release precisely orchestrated information on a routine basis, continuously re-affirming her being in all sites of public interaction. Facebook, Tumblr and any other websites the artist exists on function as theaters of recognition for viewers to gain a greater understanding of her projected image. The extent to which an artist brand becomes successful is dependent on how well the viewer is able to make sense of the matrix of information presented to them.

Human identities exist in real time while artist brands are segmented and chosen intentionally. Artist brands are conceptual beings that live somewhere in the point between the author’s informational output and the viewer’s recognition. Because today’s artist no longer relies on her in-person presence for mass recognition, we no longer need to bind single human identities to single brands.

IMPRESSIONS proposes to make the artist brand a permeable franchise open to contributions by other individuals, (should the brand’s prime author consent to others’ inclusion within the franchise). The same decoding process of viewership that allows us to understand an artist’s work may allow us to recode those patterns into new work for them. In doing so, IMPRESSIONS explores new roles of outsourced authorship and the potential for viewing to become one with creation.

Brad Troemel, 2010
Parker Ito, 2010