Tony Strickland - "Caution" Solo Exhibition - Opening Reception

CAUTION - Tony Strickland Solo Exhibition The Caution series marks a pivotal evolution in my artistic journey, reflecting over three decades of exploration and growth as a fine artist. This body of work traces its roots back to my very first large-scale painting, also titled Caution, created in 1992. That foundational piece—a bold 6x5 foot canvas—featured evenly spaced 12-inch diagonal stripes in yellow and black, was executed with a raw, expressive energy. I worked in mixed media, combining oil paint with materials like tar, burlap, and sand to create a visceral, textured surface that set the tone for much of my future work. This new series explores the intersection of humanity, art, and artificial intelligence, reflecting my ongoing creative investigation into AI technology since March 2023. The concept and inspiration behind the work was to revisit the Caution subject matter, and create compositions based on my prompts utilizing MidJourney, a generative AI application that allows users to create imagery based on prompts.. This approach offered me many different ways to manipulate my prompts to achieve the desired and unexpected visual options. I used prompts to generate initial reference images as inspiration to create the body of work in the exhibition. The result is a micro series of eight large, and seven to eight small original paintings that tell a story and take the viewer along for this artistic journey. Included in the exhibition is a display showcasing the original AI-generated images alongside the final paintings, allowing viewers to see the transformation from digital concept to physical artwork. Although each piece is related in subject matter, the final paintings are completely different and are stunning in their totality in the expansive space of the Art on Main Gallery. This body of work represents the moral quagmire AI has created for humanity. Although AI offers tremendous productivity and efficiency gains, we must also deal with the very real risk that man has engineered our own demise by creating a technology where for the first time in our existence, humans will not be at the top of the intelligence food chain. This means we must maintain and utilize extreme Caution with the implementation of the technology as it seeks to obtain AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).

Event Links

Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/3138630-0

Website: https://go.evvnt.com/3138630-2

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