While there will always be critics who ignore or dismiss artwork made with CAD software and 3D printers, there are plenty of museums and art galleries that are embracing 3D printed art. This week, a pair of Canadian artists took home the first grants from the Be3Dimensional Innovation Fund, and they were awarded in a category devoted entirely to art created using 3D technology. The winners were Vancouver-based artist Geoffrey Farmer and Northern Ontario’s Duane Linklater, an Omaskêko Cree from Moose Cree First Nation. They were selected by The National Gallery of Canada and Ryerson Image Centre as Canada’s best-in-class for creating innovative and exciting art using cutting-edge 3D technology. The pair will each draw from a $100,000 fund that was set aside to fund their efforts to create original works of art for this project.
Winning artists Geoffrey Farmer on the left [Image: Canadian Art] and Duane Linklater on the right [Image: Tanya Lukin Linklater]
“I was interested in unauthored art objects, more specifically, those objects that don’t have an attributed artist to their name. I thought that this is an interesting problem to work with. For me, it’s reflected what happens with native American objects when they enter into predominately European modern and contemporary museums — that they often lose information when they’ve been acquired. I was looking for a particular way of making these objects, copying these objects as part of creating an analogous object to speak to that loss. As a result, the final sculptures that were presented, of course, are representative of all of this lost information, missed translations. For me, that was a really important project to do,” Linklater told CBC News.
Farmer has been a popular installation artist for over twenty years and had his art featured in many world famous museums and galleries, including the Louvre in Paris, the Tate Modern in London and the National Gallery of Canada. He is also gearing up to represent Canada at the 57th International Art Exhibition in Venice Italy, where his work is expected to be created using 3D technology. His body of work is expansive, and he is most known for his massive sculptural installations that feel like three dimensional collages. Part of how he creates art is by never finishing it, and his installations are constantly being revisited and altered by him over extended periods of time. 3D printing is a natural extension of how Farmer has always made his work; he will simply be reproducing images and objects using 3D printers rather than photography, paper and foam.
“As an artist, I’m still trying to understand what it means, and I think it will take us time to understand how it’s going to change our world. But we definitely know it’s changing it. We’ve always been making reproductions of things in the world, so these things aren’t necessarily new. But in the way the technology is able to do it now is different. I’m able to go out into the world and if I see something, I can scan it and bring it back into the studio and work with it within the studio,” says Farmer.
