The Archives: Ravi Singh, Statement & Biograph

Featuring Artists and Writers of Extreme Vision.

STATEMENT.

"Crops" is a slide show of bits of information. This "information" is strangely, but intrinsically tied to the Internet because its transmission is through the web, via webpages, newsgroups, e-mail, and direct ftp. But this data is reconfigured as pictures -- binaries -- which have nothing to do with the technical. The new picture frame for painting is the the computer monitor, and its sub-frames within.

These frames are not only windows to spaces and images, but windows into a private world of exchange and voyeurism that has been facilitated by a technology whose intrinsic state is information transfer. Although lauded as a new medium for communication and commerce, the Internet has for years been the medium of instant access to all fetishism. The question for each user is whether or not to spend time looking for it (if it hasn't found you first).

And for those who don't search it out, how are they morally implicated when even seeing a fragment of it? These bits and pieces are references to the overwhelming user experience of viewing and trading "questionable" material on the web -- which accounts for the greater part of web bandwidth expenditure these past years -- but which goes on behind closed doors and conveniently out of public sight.

BIOGRAPH.

Ravi Singh received his MFA in Painting in 1998 at the University of Houston and his BFA in Painting at the Maryland Institute, College of Art in 1993.

Since 1996, he has made a progression into digital media from painting and drawing and currently works as a web design consultant in Houston, Texas.

His website, Home Bitter Home (http://rsingh.net), has featured a variety of his works and interests and serves as his on-going webdesign and art portfolio in his post-painting period. He can be contacted at ravi@rsingh.net.