Nick Gentry, a Central Saint Martin’s graduate and apparent stranger to canvas stretching, prefers to paint portraits on a canvas constructed with floppy disks. He strategically incorporates these obsolete tech properties into his subjects’ features creating a file cabinet effect. Gentry places an emphasis on recycling and reusing personal objects, acquiring dead technologies through a contribution process called Xchange. Anyone can contribute to this process by sending a box of their leftover outdated technologies to Gentry’s studio.
His work has a sinister quality, like his figure models are actually leftover cyborgs from a government experiment gone awry, found somewhere in an abandoned warehouse. Gentry uses the circular drive motor hubs of the floppy disks to depict the models’ eyes, which are usually dilated and disoriented. Their flesh is in gray tones — reminiscent of newspaper clippings. The people look smudged with carbon. His subjects emit waves of Hollywood significance — their blemishes ball point pen scribbles covering over the embarrassing notes printed on the simplistic floppy disk labels.
After an exhibit this fall in Miami at the Robert Fontaine Gallery, Gentry teamed up with Invicta and designed a watch displaying his painting The Secret Key. On his use of floppy disks, the artist explains his fascination describing them as “digital fossils.” Next up? Gentry plans on applying his eye to sculpture.
A short film of the Floppy Disk Portraits by Nick Gentry after the Jump…
via Colossal
