Las Vegas-based artist Nancy Good blends AI-generated imagery with handcrafted process in a new series of cyborgian self-portraits.
Las Vegas, Nevada | nancygoodart.com | @nancygood_art
It can be difficult, these days, to differentiate between images produced by generative AI applications and human artists. Early on, AI art seemed rudimentary, crude—laughable, even. Today, it blends into our social media feeds deceptively well. Against this backdrop, Las Vegas-based artist Nancy Good has presented a series of portraits produced in collaboration with AI programs to upend the dichotomy between human and machine. In effect, her work presents a new form of art making altogether.
To begin, Good instructs a generative AI program to produce a set of images based on her own portrait, which she then prints, hand cuts onto sheets of linoleum, and embellishes by hand, producing mask-like portraits reminiscent of abstracted tribal iconography. From a distance, the result is strangely familiar. Once you spend time studying them closely, the details of each artwork confirm that they have been, at some stage, handcrafted; and yet, at their core, Good’s work remains methodologically foreign.
Priestess (2022), for example—the first installment in Good’s series—presents a portrait of a figure whose visage is relatively legible. In the center of the canvas, a bald figure with a porous halo glares indifferently past the viewer, their neck elongated as if stretched by neck rings.
However, by the third installment—Mystic (2022)—Good’s portraits have veered into the semi-alien. Though the portrait maintains a sharp jaw, pursed lips, and round-ish eyes, the primarily computer-generated figure features marks and patterns that combine the corpse-like and the robotic. For example, its forehead resembles a circuit board, and its right cheek juts dramatically out of frame. Even with the artist’s careful corrections, the AI-generated base of the image remains uncanny and, frankly, superhuman.
In the final installment of the series, Seer (2022), Good presents a portrait that is positively cyborg. Featuring ambiguous numbers of eye sockets and mouths, this portrait represents the least human (and most robotic) visage of an individual, including buttons, pots, grills, and even antennae.
Altogether, Good’s series made me wonder how different this instance of deliberate abstraction is from movements within modern art, like Cubism and Surrealism. After all, contemporary artists toy with the boundaries of reality all the time—why should computer-generated art be so different?
Disclosure: Nancy Good is a member of Southwest Contemporary’s Editorial Advisory Board.
