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There’s a sense that some prior system <aesthetic, digital, cultural, emotional> has broken down in Sara Ludy’s new paintings.
Since the early aughts Ludy’s work has traversed the frontier of net art’s circulation, waded the cool ashes of post-net irony, and moved to the speculative pulse of web3. What’s left behind is dissipated, layered, soft-focused. Grid systems collapse at the margins. Paint accumulates like fingerprint smudges in the sun and something holographic emerges. A lenticular shimmer, a dimensional bleed between temporal registers; maybe digital, or dream, or whatever comes before and after waking life.
Wielding a paint roller as analog counterpart to the screen’s downward flick Ludy reanimates the gesture as a return, not escape. Unlike the fugitive swipe of the infinite scroll the roller loops and layers, dragging perception into sedimented strata. Each pass building a psychic terrain; weathered, refracted, felt.
Always shifting between cadences of digital and analog, the afterimage of the screen still glows. Phantom limbs of cognition, ambient textures of vision, and spectral feedback between a data-driven mirage and touching grass looms. Moments burn and persist in absence like looking too long at a screen. A trace of light made permanent in the detritus of perception; floaters, lens flares, and retinal afterimages trail in the residue of photopsias.
Habits of visual scanning wander the surface in search of a context detached from utility. You’ve seen this before, but where? The memory hovers and refuses to stabilize. Hauntological; the echo of bygone interfaces, vestiges of menu shadows, gradients from obsolete systems, half-remembered protocols that once guided the eye, now fatigued and drifting loose from function.
Shaped by experimentation and interdisciplinarity, Ludy’s paintings hold time differently than her durational work as the paintings are “always on”, ready to repeat and refract. Not about the digital, but steeped intimately and intuitively; its textures, its omissions, its ghosts, Later Fields metabolizes the ambient zone between online and irl, softening the circuitry we’re already inside.
—Marie Heilich
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