An excerpt of a recent text written by Alex Estorick for Flotsam and Jetsam, Don't Look Projects, Los Angeles with SLQS Gallery, London. 2025

 

At a moment when all images are flowing into an AI algorithm, the canons of painting, photography, and film are converging into an undifferentiated field of digital “slop”. Diana Taylor’s practice makes legible the imminent threat of cultural blindness by splicing together different forms of visual grammar into a state of alluring aporia. Layering the graphical matrix of Gustave Doré’s woodblock prints for Dante’s Divine Comedy together with a surfeit of other patterns over a pixel grid, the artist’s works for Flotsam and Jetsam make legible the collapse of analogue and digital organizing principles that AI obscures. 

 

This is painting as gerund: a process of ceaseless resolution and obfuscation that highlights the blind spots in a world of superabundant imagery. By deploying pattern as visual friction, Taylor slows the gaze over her chosen source materials—from astrological inquiries in medieval prints to the sample books of William Morris—juxtaposing different idioms in order to isolate the moments when meaning breaks down, and where history is rewritten.

 

Like a number of contemporary artists coming to terms with a state o\f postdigital experience, where all sense perception is preloaded with digital artifacts, Taylor’s hybrid approach confronts a reality where more images are produced by machines for machines than any other. As art enters its nonhuman age, the artist is fortifying painting against datafication and easy prompting, preserving painting as a strict domain of the human.

 

Alex Estorick,