Bryony Hillman

I grew up in the era of recommendation media. Because you liked this, you might like ThisTM, media. My adolescence was polluted with suggested-for-you’s, and my twenties, so far, has been an attempt at decoding this accumulation of algorithmic approximations, and decipheringwhether I, me, or anyone else, has anything to do with any of it at all.



I’ve been trying to reconcile the irreconcilability of the world around me by (almost like a computer) compressing 'data' into something hopefully legible or comprehensible. ‘Data’ as in litter, modernity’s debris, the things we can’t avoid seeing, our thought pollution, human sentiments and sentimentalities, things we can’t avoid thinking, that sentence that plays over and over again inside your head, the tedious peculiarities, the wonder, the dread, being underwhelmed in the face of it all, that funny feeling, all of it happening to all of us all at once.



I am dissecting myself, and alongside that, modernity, in an attempt to make sense of it all — like compression of experience, or data, as decompression of self.



Just like the networked effects of modernity, these compressed groupings of data - my works - have formed a larger network, or web, of information. This network (my practice) is interconnected through representational and meta self-referential relationships, which communicate across different material disciplines to render some kind of simulated articulation of the world. Think of it as pseudo data storage, or data consolidation.



This 'simulation’ (the whole practice) - or the smaller individual sub-simulations (a painting on a brick) - form situations which emphasise my data-fatigue or data-despondency with a peculiarly potent hopefulness or sentimentality. My works are attempts at capturing resolute moments of modernity that are sentimental, while maintaining honest doubts in that same sentimentality; painting with a kind of pessimistic optimism, or agnostimisticsm (neither pessimism or optimism, but a secret third thing) around what it means to be alive today.