Of Vanitas is a commentary on a category of still life paintings: Vanitas. Vanitas paintings highlight and lament the transience of all things with recurring iconographic components such as a skull to represent the mortality of man, books to symbolize the futility of knowledge in the face of eternity, and an extinguished candle and flowers to symbolize the inevitability.
As you walk down the celebratory red carpet, your footsteps are mapped to different phases in life: birth, childhood, highschool, college, your first job, marriage, family, serving as grandparents, and finally, death. On the right, crowd-generated Instagram images corresponding to the different phases are projection mapped onto the canvas. The visualization responds to your movement on the red carpet. On the left is an oil-painting made of oil-paintings. It is not a Vanitas painting, but a commentary of it, and an attempt to capture the process of distillation.
Of Vanitas is the first of a series that investigates and contrasts the properties of oil-painting as a medium with interactive art installations as a form of inquiry. What is more relevant? Symbols and allusions that are transcendent across time and geography as a result of distillation, or real-time data that are regenerated every second?
What is the relationship between anecdotes and theories? If abstraction is more than just a summation of figuration, what lies on the edge between abstraction and anecdotes?