Pixelated Pointillism, Artist Lily Bunney Reflects On Our Digital Selves
Our lives revolve around technology—it's as simple as that. We depend on it for our jobs, communication, building community, and accessing limitless information at our fingertips. Yet, as it advances so does our dependence on it. Shaping our habits, how we navigate relationships, and view the world around us, it’s how technology dictates our interactions that artist Lily Bunney is putting the spotlight on. Fantasising About Wild Horses, her new exhibition at Miłość Gallery, forces us to confront our relationship with technology and how our dependence on the digital is shaping our behaviours.
I initially discovered Bunney and her work when I took a scroll through Instagram, and was stopped in my tracks (a rarity these days), by a pixelated paparazzi image of Julia Fox where the lower-half of her body had been replaced by the legs of a Barbie doll rocking on a toy horse. A plush centaur doll-human with thick coal-black eye-liner, to offer my own summation. Instantly, I shot her an Instagram DM, and we connected.
‘I think it's a reality that so much of our intimate relationships are formulated through technology and through social media,’ Bunney tells me over the phone. Her interest in the ways the digital serves as a mediator for modern-day connection and the culture our relationship to it has produced, manifests in eight different works.
Across this exhibition, viewers are privy to intimate moments of friendship. A walk to a music festival or finger hearts - these pockets of sweetness are a reflection of a rich interior life. But, interrupting these moments are two large-scale pointillism paintings of instantly recognisable figures: Julia Fox and Jennette McCurdy.
I found myself perplexed as to why these two, who occupy entirely different worlds of celebrity, were chosen as the focal point of Bunney’s fantasising about wild horses. ‘The reason I picked them was because they both have these memoirs about very traumatic experiences and then those memoirs have been disseminated through social media in this very interesting and weird way’, she explains.
Her first experience of seeing social media’s dissemination of the two star’s respective trauma was through an audio excerpt from McCurdy’s raw memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died split-screened with a video of the iPhone game Subway surfers (she explicitly references this in her aforementioned painting of Julia Fox). Split-screen videos are a tactic employed to keep our low-attention spans (thanks, social media) captivated to watch the full-length of videos. Seeing how these videos are repurposed on social media fed Bunney’s artillery for inspiration.
Her purposeful centering of McCurdy and Fox, figures associated by fans as being relatable and brave via their unashamed account of their traumas, as the focal figures, against intimate acts of friendship in her own interior life underscores the increasingly blurring lines between our own intimate relationships and ones we form with celebrity figures via our screens, a.k.a the parasocial relationship. But it is an observation only, she says, ‘[It’s] less that I’m interested in critiquing it and more that I am interested in turning the eye inwards. I don’t want it to be about what I’m seeing. I want it to be about what it’s saying about me,’ she explains.
Her concern with examining her own relationship with digital technology dictates not only her subject matter, but also her process of mining found imagery. She explains, ‘I try to get off [social media] in a way, and kind of say, these are the things that I am seeing on here, but I am going to go out and find a different thing that encapsulates that experience. I try to also run it through a secondary filter of like if you're having to seek out an image you have to reflect on what that image is and why you like it, instead of just taking what’s being served to you.’
Aside from the constant tension Bunney feels existing and participating in our culture of digital consumption, she found her aesthetic footing through her fascination with the technologies she focuses on. Her pointillism paintings are partly inspired by Sadie Plant’s Zero + Ones, which details the history of computers. Bunney quickly summarises for me, ‘The original, or part of the inspiration of how computers work came from the Jacquard loom and the punch cards that they used to program the Jacquard loom. So yes, I got really interested in that and a lot of my drawings are about leaning into that pixelated look.’ In a more modern tune and right on the nose of her work she admits as well, ‘And the honest truth is, I spend a lot of time on TikTok.’
Her passion and extensive knowledge of these technologies sets off an alarm bell in my head, and I cannot resist but to ask her about the hot-button issue on everyone’s mind: AI. Her interest immediately piqued by the question, ‘I haven’t really done anything with AI. I think that’s because I would want to really be engaged with it. I think it’s going to change the way we consume imagery. And I think I’m very interested in how we consume imagery. I think yeah 100 percent [I’d work with it].’
Bunney’s bold incorporation of digital technologies foreshadows a hopeful path where artistry and technology intersect. Artists often feel stifled by the technological world, but Bunney’s seamless weaving of these two worlds has paved a singular vision representative of modernity. Fantising about wild horses forces us to examine our own parasocial behaviours caused by our dependence on digital technologies, not out of judgement, but with an objective, ‘this is how our culture has progressed’.
fantising about wild horses is on display at miłość gallery until December 14th.