Claudio Tola

Suburban melancholic, digital nihilist, full-time flâneur.
I combine a speculative observation of reality—physical and digital, public and personal—with a hunting-and-gathering of found visual materials, and a studio practice where meaning is made through formal transformations of those materials: gestures of appropriation, un-making, and re-staging. I make images—moving and still, digital and analog—through a sculptural lens; I work in/by/with fragments, loops, and layers; I endlessly edit.

Growing up in the late 2000s in a province of Italy, reality was brought to me on a 4:3 LCD monitor, via an unstable ethernet connection. I got to know most of the world first through its digital reproduction. This intimate yet detached relation with digital imagery, and the awareness of its ambiguous nature - illusive immersion and indifferent distance - is fundamental to the sensibility at the core of my work.

Reflecting on notions of image, screen, and gaze as theoretical constructs, technological objects, and embodied experiences, I am interested in how these mediate our relationship to reality, exploring both personal and collective desires to see, and anxieties of being seen. By lingering at thresholds, edges, and sites of failure, my work addresses the ontology and technics of visibility, display, and representation; it explores the tensions and technologies inherent to the production and experience of images in our contemporary, questioning the relations and expectations they produce, and drawing attention to the interfaces that mediate their appearance.