Anja Salonen's Future Bodies questions the limits of painting in the virtual age. While aware of their historical context, Salonen's paintings are heavily reliant on a post-analogue visual language, and explore the interaction between body and virtual. Salonen's “Avatars,” digital personas which are uniform, ambiguous, androgynous, and intangible, interrogate identity in the internet era, where the distinctions between self and mask, real and virtual, become increasingly nebulous. In control V, referencing the work of Edouard Manet, Salonen brings attention to the ways in which female bodies continue to be appropriated, fractured, revised, distorted, censored, and objectified in the digital era. Alluding to traditions of painting in which women’s bodies were used by male artists as blank slates on which to further visual representation, Salonen calls upon the viewer to question what has changed and what has remained invariably the same in depictions of women and female sexuality in the 21st century. Future Bodies is on view now at As It Stands Gallery, 2601 Pasadena Ave, Los Angeles. photographs by Summer Bowie
