Art meets AI: Marquette Arts and Culture exhibits now on display

By CHRISTIE

MASTRIC

Journal Staff Writer

MARQUETTE -- How can artificial intelligence change a work of art? How can a cell phone capture images of Eastern Europe? And how are the Venice canals of California depicted in one artist's vision?

Artistic expressions of several varieties are on display through September at the city of Marquette Arts and Culture Center, located in the lower level of the Peter White Public Library, as well as the PWPL itself.

Public receptions were held on Thursday at the Deo Gallery in the MACC, the Lower Level Lobby Gallery outside the Deo Gallery, and the Huron Mountain Club Gallery on the PWPL's main floor for the three artists whose work is featured.

Anthony Aumann's exhibit, on display in the Deo Gallery, is titled "Inner Turmoil, Outer Beauty: Portraits of Contradiction," while "Exaltation of Life Scenes" by Tamara Lee Niemi is in the Lower Level Lobby Gallery. The Huron Mountain Club Gallery features Daric Christian's "Cell Phone Photography."

Aumann, a professor of philosophy at Northern Michigan University, specializes in portraits, but they're not necessarily your typical "happy portraits." Instead, many of them show people with expressions that show more complicated emotions.

Aumann said he's a portrait painter who uses oil pastels on soft velour paper.

"I love just the feel of it, which you can almost see from a distance on some of them," he said.

What about his subject matter?

"I'm going to say this in 'artist talk,'" Aumann said. "I'm tired and bored of prettiness. It's tempting because it gets a lot of clicks, but it doesn't sustain. It's like candy."

Thus, painting something "lasting" is more important to him than prettiness.

But how does a painter get to that point?

"I think it's about difficulty and pain and discomfort, which you often think of as inconsistent with beauty, but what I'm trying to explore is how -- in human faces and human emotions -- pain, discomfort, difficulty is bound up with beauty and not inconsistent with it," Aumann said.

He goes for the "Mona Lisa effect" too.

For example, a portrait of a boy driving a toy car is not your typical "happy kid" painting.

"This is the boy driving into his own future," Aumann said.

However, he acknowledged that some of his work is commissioned, and the people who request these paintings want "a little more happiness."

Shown in the current Deo Gallery exhibit are several self-portraits, which typical of his style don't have the "grin-and-look-at-the-camera" look.

Aumann also is making the use of artificial intelligence in his artwork, examples of which are on display as well.

Aumann submits one of his paintings into an AI program and asks it to generate variations. He then sorts between those variations and paints one of them.

The results, understandably, are varied -- "all kinds of different wild things, and some of them good, some of them not so good," he said.

Aumann stressed that the finished work is not a print.

"It's me actually doing the work of painting it again," he said.

Christian's "Cell Phone Photography" exhibit offers visitors another artistic dimension.

"My goal is not to document but to recreate the feeling I had at that moment and in that place," Christian said in his artist statement. "Light and scale are the most critical elements to replicate those feelings."

His photographs, he noted, allow him to "strip away" complexity and focus on composition and visceral feelings.

Christian also said he carries his phone everywhere and often photographs the environments he experiences.

"Shortly afterward, I usually process those images on my phone using various techniques," he said.

The works in the display are "informed" by the historical process of photography that he explored in his younger years as an artist, Christian said.

Christie Mastric can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 550. Her email address is cbleck@miningjournal.net.