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Topographic Paintings Manifest Data—Not Mountains

Striking landscape murals are cartographic knock-offs.

At first look, Sydney-based artist Jonathan Zawada’s uber-saturated oil pantings look to be portrayals of long-studied geographic phenomena, endlessly toiled over to depict the beautiful austerity of nature’s extremities—like the exact coloring and shadowing of an epic sunset, the positioning of a sweaty midday sun, or the wind’s slight exhalation over an otherwise still body of water.

It is an astounding revelation to then find out that Zawada’s paintings are really based off 3D rendered graph data, rather than the realistic landscapes they so genuinely appear to be. The charts he used to model his paintings, which were displayed alongside the artworks in a recent exhibition entitled Over Time at the Prism Gallery in L.A., touch on social and cultural contingencies like “Marijuana usage among year 12 students vs. CD and Vinyl record sales between 1975 and 2000.” Other graphs juxtapose quickly fleeting current events with technological advancements such as the landscape displaying the “Value of land per square meter in Second Life vs. Value of land per square foot in Dubai between 2007 and 2009.”

The artist says:

The landscapes are a response to the "virtual" reality of digital experiences that are highlighted by the intrinsic flatness and surreal color palette. Invoking the robotics hypothesis of the "Uncanny Valley," the works take on an android quality, a sense of reality but not quite, registering with the viewer as both familiar and dissimilar. This theme carries through to the drawings, juxtaposing the hyper-real with the conceptually abstract and underlining the temporality of human experience.

[via Triangulation Blog]