Billy Crosby: Airplane Mode

About

Mare Karina is pleased to present Airplane Mode, a solo exhibition by Billy Crosby, on view in Venice, Italy, from September 27th until November 16th, 2024. Born in 1992 in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, Crosby currently lives and works in London. Airplane Mode marks the artist's first exhibition with the gallery and in Italy, and it features new paintings created during his final year at the Royal College of Art in London.

Airplane Mode addresses the structure of feelings produced by the developing complexities of technological acceleration. Walking a line between sentimentality, anxiety and hope, his paintings are sympathetic vessels; things downstream of digital media, where data flows intermingle with neurological excitement and the clunky charm of material manipulation.

Miniature houses manifest like fungus out of stained abstract landscapes; herds of cows in seemingly liminal spaces as if viewed from a passing train and bearing the eerie uniformity of cloning experiments; and shirts woven from neural network-like spider web patterns, glow, in environments of soft decay and blooming emergence. In the artist's studio, raw canvas is left to absorb abstract acrylic washes before intricate airbrushing, collage techniques and 3D puff paint detailing is applied to embroider its surface. Everywhere things coalesce, as if gently alive.

Crosby’s work filters algorithmically driven image culture through the escapist pastoral tropes of a simpler reality. Using a psychedelic configuration of perspectives, the micro and the macro constantly shift and muddle into one another. This new body of work draws on the fragmented, non-linear critical media theories by Vilém Flusser (1920 – 1991, Czech Republic and Brazil) and Berlin-based writer Caroline Busta (b. 1978, US). AI technology is embraced to painterly reconfigure the familiar, producing emergent properties in a landscape where an attenuation to vibe is as good a light as any to guide us through the mist.