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“MECHA”.
Channelling the mischievous, anarchic spirit of Dadaists from the turn of the 20th Century, Japanese American artist KATSU (b.1982) began as a graffiti writer in the streets of New York in the early 2000s and has been developing his artistic output ever since. Through the use of drone technology, video, sculpture, and public intervention, KATSU explores the omnipresence of digital culture, privacy and the pervasive anxiety around technology and its potential for use and misuse.
Mecha presents a suite of paintings made using drone technology which the artist has developed and honed for the past decade. Channelling this technology, through custom-built painting drones and specialised software, the artist programs drones to create portraits, landscapes, and abstract dot paintings.
Presented as distinctive series’, each of the works have been created by deploying autonomous and semi-autonomous painting drones to render directly on the canvas. The final outcome is not exclusively made by the artist, but instead occurs in collaboration between human and machine - mechas.
These brightly coloured, playful paintings belie a more serious undercurrent. The human experience of mark making has been outsourced via technology to the machine, bringing the idea of authorship and validation into question.
. Rather than improving quality of life, it can be argued, technology has stripped away humanistic values like
“MECHA”.
