God Shaped Hole

Byung-Chul Han says that smartphones are ‘devotional objects of the digital’, and ‘Likes are the digital Amen. When we click Like, we are bowing down to the order of domination. The smartphone is […] a mobile confessional’ (Psychopolitics, 2017, p. 12). In a manner akin to the ‘opulent accumulation’ of votive offerings in shrines, we confess, pray, and give thanks on social media, accounting our lives through the number of steps we have walked, where we’ve been, the food we’ve eaten, the things we’ve Liked, and the setbacks we have experienced.

This presentation examines paintings by Caspar White, Dawn Woolley and Zara Worth that draw on traditional religious artforms to explore our actions and interactions on and with social media. The paintings function like votives (Woolley), and icons (White; Worth). ‘Treat Yourself’ by Woolley is series of paintings on broken or discarded mobile phones and tablets. The imagery was found through online searches for #health, #fitness and #wellness, yielding content expressing often contradictory ideas about indulgence and self-care. The paintings recall votives, hinting at how online interactions and self-tracking practices evoke confession, prayer, and gratitude. White creates pairs of portraits referencing classical religious paintings and TikTok videos with visual similarities. In each diptych the expressions and gesticulations of the central figures are reminiscent of each other, despite their seemingly disconnected original contexts. It is not White’s intention to mock or critique these contemporary icons through this juxtaposition, but to find beatific beauty in unexpected, everyday places. Both Russian Orthodox icons and Instagram selfie-filters use decorative motifs and gestures to signal the presence of a preeminent figure. The paintings from Worth’s installation ‘#Portal’ synthesise these forms into monochrome metallic compositions on transparent polythene. Parallels are drawn between how each referent uses these decorative features to communicate presence, be it heavenly or human.

The digital cultures which the artworks refer to may well have come to occupy a void left by religion in secular life; a space which they easily fill since they already echo the forms and promises made by devotional objects and practices, and respectively offer transcendence and transcend their materiality. The on- and off-line are no longer distinct, the digital’s, ‘fluid media space’ has seeped into reality; transitioning into other forms of matter. As Hito Steyerl observes, ‘Far from being opposites across an unbridgeable chasm, image and world are in many cases just versions of each other. They are not equivalents however, but deficient, excessive, and uneven in relation to each other. And the gap between them gives way to speculation and intense anxiety’.White, Woolley and Worth each work in these spaces of speculation and anxiety between the digital and physical.

This presentation will compare the processes through which these artists each transform digital subjects into material in order to arrest them, whilst also engaging with a second subject matter (divinity and the divine) which is itself an immaterial subject made matter throughout art history.