Jacques Vartabedian

Jacques Vartabedian | Prototype 4, 2018

Three prototypes of walls are represented in three paintings, covering nearly the entire landscape, while leaving room for the viewer to see some portion of what is behind the divider to comprehend reality, in all its complexity, subjectively, politically, and symbolically. Alongside with three paintings of different destinations around the world that one could travel virtually. The landscape images are retrieved from the Internet while googling “beautiful destinations around the world” and “pilgrimage destinations” “Web people” and “Wall People” the term coined by Thomas Friedman highlights two different ideologies of the present. One to maintain political boundaries and the other to be borderless, like the Internet. Both ideas seem to share nothing in common, yet both point to the same crisis of political representation. The project examines the dichotomy of the physical and virtual and highlights the current world situation; the struggle of maintaining a harmony between the geographical physical boundaries and the Internet. It allows showing how shifting power structures shade the present moment and questions the legitimacy of having an ideology that satisfies every one of the general population. Does anything exist without having restrictions? Should we consider building a new platform in response to the accelerations in technology, globalization, relocation and climate change that is transforming the planet?