Multimedia artist Grant Shumate presents his show Various Positions at the Dries Van Noten Little House, open now through June 19th. In the new show at the Los Angeles location of Dries Van Noten, Shumate presents 25 paintings positioned on metal rods, created through a photoshop glitch that collapsed several images into one. The artist, who often works in technology-driven work, translated these photoshop glitches to canvas, saying “Immediately, I saw this lineage of Clyfford Still and Sam Francis and Richard Diebenkorn paintings.”

In this collection of works that Shumate calls “digital mulch”, he continues his work in layered imagery, adjusting color and cropping portions to create a balance in the abstractions. In addition to showing the works at the Little House, Shumate has minted the works as NFTs, featuring animations and soundscapes, further elevating the digital to physical dialogue.

Flaunt caught up with the artist to discuss Various Positions, working with Dries Van Noten, the digital versus physical worlds, and the NFT craze. Read below, and visit the show at the Dries Van Noten Little House before it closes on June 19th.

So we are talking about your show at Dries Van Noten, in the Little House, Various Positions. Being at this specific location has some sort of significance, and it’s very much about inhabiting that specific space, and I think what you've done, by having these works lining the walls to totally engulf the viewer, is really making use of that space. How did you approach putting this together?

I like spaces that are unique in their sense of place. It's an unconventional gallery, to start off with. And then introducing being connected to this brand, which typically isn't something that I'm really that into, but I really liked the brand, so I thought it was a good starting place. I had been working on these pieces for the last two or three years, and when I looked at them I was like, well, it made sense to be in that space in some way. It reminds me of a lot of the kind of prints that were going on in the store already. It felt like a natural fit, like an extension of what was going on inside of the store. There's something to that, the layering and patterns really reminded me of just the way that Dries makes work, so there's something to that, and then also having a place where I really could be playful and be more conceptual in some ways, and I wouldn't necessarily have to do a more standard show where I can just throw something up.

Thinking about that playfulness, I think this idea of this digital mulch, it's very playful. You’re digging through this bucket of components to assemble into these pieces. I'm curious as to what that selection process looks like?

What happened was, I was working in a processing system that had a ton of images, and at one point, all of those images collapsed into one another. The project I was working on was just a lot of reference images, so things that were anything from like stock photography to things that I've taken as inspiration photos to whatever. All sorts of different things. And as it broke into these abstract expressions, it made me just think about what abstraction was in the first place, and also how maybe an abstract painter or some minimalist would walk through the world and take in all this information. Like see people sitting at a cafe, see the sky, see a dog walk by, whatever, and then go back, and somehow take from all that, this very simple abstract gesture that somehow, inside, embodies all of that. And this kind of did it on its own.

So it had all this content that was of all these different shots of life, but somehow broke into these abstract expressions, and I could see parallels between other artists that I really appreciated, painters of the past, and what had happened inside of it, so I thought it was kind of an interesting remix of these styles that I had appreciated from the past. I had a bunch of these together in groupings inside of my studio, and they looked kind of like a language. They would sit on top of each other or next to each other, and they were almost like notes in a song or had some sort of quality like that where, as groupings, they started to have a power and talk to each other. So that was more or less the way that they were put together.

It was: how can they be installed in a way where they kind of have an energetic charge through the language that they're creating together. There's something about them being, in some way, like these things that are digital, but also at the same time really being a classic way of making a painting, which is raw canvas, there's paint on the canvas, and it's stretched, and it's just very traditional in that sense, but done in a way that is starting from somewhere else and ending up in the same place.

It’s this digital versus natural. Even the word “mulch” is implying something that comes from something in nature. It's got that dialogue.

And they’re on top of metal rods. You can roll them, to some extent, and reveal things behind them. They are simple in a way that is reminiscent of some sort of mid century design, which I think is kind of an influence with these paintings. I always kind of imagined them in more modern spaces like that. Even like the dinner we had after the opening, we had it in my friend’s house, and we had a few of the works in there, and my idea is that, even though they might feel new and fresh in some way as far as a painting, at the same time they could still hold their own and sit inside of something that's like a classic mid century home. The metal rods have something to do with that. It kind of is reminiscent of design from that era.

The metal rods then allow them to have a shifting dialogue, because you know they can move and shift the composition of the entire work in the space. With the same contrast of digital and natural, what do you think of these digitally originated textures versus the tactile textures of the clothing at Dries?

I'm really fascinated in ways that things move in between the digital and the physical worlds. I think us, as humans, and society, and a culture, we're doing that all the time, more and more now. I mean, half of our life is lived in a digital world, and then the other half is in the physical. I think that I'm always trying to play with that to some extent. And so, as someone who always considers myself to be rooted in some sort of art historical tradition, but also wanting to play around with different things, it's a fun and challenging thought process to figure out what that is going to look like. With this one, it really made sense. I worked with creative partners name's Trent Mazur, he's a composer and musician, and we were talking about doing stuff together, where we were going to mix audiovisual experiences together, and we started talking about NFT's and I was like, ‘well you know the paintings, they start from digital files.’ We actually worked with a certain niche animator that's in Paris, and she took all of the original files that turned into paintings, and animated them. And then Trent, made soundscapes for each one of them. So the physical paintings actually have a digital counterpart, and they go together with each other. So if you were to purchase the NFT, you also get the physical painting and vice versa.

6503144C-5031-4A34-A92F-D7797BC44346-39510-0000196D8AF36DEF.JPG — Photo by Eduard Grau

I think about that back and forth between the digital and physical realms a lot, and my digital footprint, and how much it really relates to my physical footprint. I wonder if they’re the same, or if the digital world is becoming more and more divorced from our physical existence.

As we are pushing down this road, they're going to continually merge more and more together into one identity. With younger generations, it’s already their idea of who they are, but older generations see themselves as quite different. It's fascinating, and I have played around a fair amount in different types of technologies, augmented stuff and XR, AR, and VR. The fascinating part inside of it is really the idea of future self. What is the self, and what is the simulation that's inside of one thing, and then what are we in right now, and kind of playing around with those big thoughts is really fun and philosophical. I find myself caught in between two worlds, oftentimes, which is that I make a lot of ceramics, I hand paint things, I do other things, but then I also play in these digital worlds, and it’s constantly about finding ways that I can bring them all together and act like the new and the old. Something like ceramics, as an example, I'm looking at something here, but it's one of the oldest art technologies that there is. It's an ancient technology that has stood the test of time, and it's still going strong, so I don't want to deny that technology for some sort of fad. I think these things are all technologies, and it's just a matter of how you combine them in interesting ways to speak about.

Thinking about fads, where do you see the NFT craze taking the art world?

I don't follow it that closely. I'm not that versed in it, but the thing that I find fascinating is that it can control and play with what painting is and how it's worth something. And what that means for the artist, and so for me, to actually have an opportunity to play more with the structure of the art market I think is something worth exploring. Ultimately, I think good things made with different technologies will always stick around. And the same way Nam June Paik work is still interesting today, even though that technology is completely outdated. I think anything being made today, if it's done in the right way, is going to stand the test of time. When it comes to the NFT thing, there is something about being able to mint your work, rights on things, royalties, or how it gets used that is ultimately kind of liberating and fascinating. I think that's a good example of something that I wouldn't necessarily do at a more mainstream gallery, but inside of this space, it’s something that I can play around with and bring in like a crypto dealer and just see how that works.

It's an interesting wrench that's been thrown into things.

At the end of day, currency itself is changing. The value of things is changing, and how we value things is going to change. It's an interesting dialogue to have. A digital print on a canvas can be just as valuable as anything else, and I think that's something that I've also been arguing for a while. Something like an NFT has actually enabled that, because it’s able to give value to anything that you want to get back. Even if there's some sort of art historical argument over what actually makes it a painting, if it has value as value. And that's it, that's dictated by who decides that value.

And there's this conversation about how it's democratizing things. Any final words?

As an overview, the paintings are there as like some sort of like modern take on something that I see to be an extension of abstract expressionism and minimalism, and do it in a way that is also really honest to who I am in the moment that I'm living in, and doing it in a way that also honors like the store and the brand that's next to it. That was like the general intention of what was going on inside of it.