How do we define a painting? This is a difficult and much debated question in the Expanded Field discourse. The artist Wade Guyton’s work exemplifies the notion of re-configuring how we classify a painting: by running canvas through a printer to create an image Guyton critiques the idea of traditional painting, digital discourses and modern technologies. Frew has taken inspiration from Guyton in this sense. By appropriating digital printing within a painterly discourse by printing onto canvas and stretching it over a frame, he aims to question the constituent elements which compose a painting, reconfiguring them with processes associated with other media. Furthermore, the use of a URL to signify the digital location of an absent image calls into consideration the nature of how we assimilate visual information – can an image operate in two places at once in both a digital and analogue state?

Digital textile print on canvas.