There you go
This past year, I’ve made paintings based on a road trip I took around the Highlands, thinking about how the kinds of photos we take for social media might feed into contemporary landscape painting, and the gap between being in a place and looking at its image. The title of this piece refers to the idea of travel as a way to “find yourself”. When I moved to Glasgow, the phrase “wherever you go, there you are” kept running through my mind, wondering if a new city would help me resolve my problems, or if I would just be the same person in a different place. The title’s use of “you” also ties into my research on the anti-selfie, positioning the viewer as the protagonist of the scene rather than a disembodied observer, as one often is in front of a Renaissance painting. This shift makes the image feel more universal, allowing it to enter the larger flow of images we encounter daily. Finally, phrases like “there you go” or “here you are” are often said when handing someone something they’ve asked for, which connects to the idea of Instagrammable images providing something easily liked and shared, rather than something truly original.
