Deirdre McAdams’ work investigates the generative possibilities and philosophical implicationsof a technologically-aided approach to the medium of painting. The paintings begin with aprocess of associative reference, wherein a phrase or a title acts to inform the compositions. Her recent work considers figurative abstraction through the lens of digital production: theimages are made using software and then re-created with oil paint on canvas. The figure is depicted as existing within the fragmented, layered conception of space present in the digitalrealm and operates as collage, as an entity of divisible parts, and as both object and subject in the work.

Additionally her work explores the friction between analog and digital modes of making, and the act of translation or simulation that is inherent in all representation. While the digital painting tools used to make the source images mimic the effects of analog means, the final paintings work to represent the look and feel of digital aesthetics, bringing the notion of reference into a circular feedback loop. The painterly mark is erased or degraded through the use of software, and that degradation is depicted, or at times resisted, in the subsequent oil paintings. The mark and how it functions as signifier of subjectivity in painting is present in the work partly through its negation.