Cloud Painter

An exhibition by Joshua Vettivelu and Andreas Buchwaldt

13 January – 18 February 2023

Opening Reception: Friday, 13 January 2023, 6:00-8:00PM

Artist Walk-Throughs:
Wednesday, February 15, 6-7PM
Saturday, February 18, 2-4PM

Cloud Painter presents a future, speculative reality, where society is forced to live within a biodome following centuries of state orchestrated natural resources extraction that left the world inhospitable. In this world, artists are forced to assume a more essential, utilitarian role in society and become cloud painters, who are tasked with maintaining the sky of the biodome to ensure comfort and entertainment for Earth’s remaining citizens.  

Taking shape as an imagined cloud painter’s office, featuring views of the biodome’s sky, this immersive exhibition is meant to inspire correlations between current realities of cultural workers and artists, and the conceptual lives of cloud painters, particularly when considering issues of labour, precarity, and resource distribution. Cloud Painter reflects on today’s, covert hierarchy of valued labour, designated between two kinds “non-essential but permitted” or “essential and required”, which are historically defined through race, gender, ability, class, and the overarching narrative of the state. Currently, arts and culture – for many – isn’t recognized as essential labour, and this lack of recognition contributes to the sector being underfunded. However, the sector is permitted to exist, as arts and culture is used to reflect a nation’s domestic and international public image. Cloud Painter depicts a societal reality where non-essential labour of the traditional cultural worker goes against the interest of the state, thereby losing its status of permitted, crumbling into an discrepant existence of losing creative agency in the face of precarity.