Bethany Hadfield’s practice exists in different dimensions: one confined to the screen, focusing on rendered animations and digital images, and the other inherently physical, consisting of large-scale acrylic paintings. The artist’s process starts with the generation of digital improvisations using an open-source 3D software. The resulting image is then projected and traced onto the canvas. Hadfield employs acrylic paint on primed canvas to eliminate gestural notions, achieving a smooth, artificial finish. Despite the long and laborious methodology, Hadifeld’s canvases appear almost fully void of human touch. Usually paint smudges and drips to display the manifestation of the brushstroke invoking vitality. In Hadfield’s case, this vitality is inherently semi-artificial: digital images are literally translated on canvas with little or no room for gesture.

Serving as physical records of the image economy, the works are formed from networked labour and collaboration with the artificial machine. Indirectly, the artist’s work operates a commentary on the blurring of the natural human process and the digital one, thereby prompting us to reflect on our own relationship with technology and its effect on human social interaction.

Hadfield’s paintings breathe with a sense of nostalgia. With seamless gradients and slick pastels, they evoke 1960s sci-fi imagery like that of Frank Frazetta and Roger Deanand, summoning an era of utopian imaginings. Hadfield’s canvases induce a sense of unease and a lack of clarity, leaving the audience unsure as to what they are looking at and how the works were created. The dystopian dimension of Hadfield’s art stimulates viewers to question their own fundamental understanding of the world we inhabit.