428 Precondition Required Painting

Nadia Jaber’s paintings jump around, scrolling between textures, flipping tabs into new color palettes and stretching materiality. She riffs between styles and ideas, cutting and scratching them like a DJ would, to curate something entirely new. The eyes and mind can keep up of course, because we’re used to this hyperactive image intake - we do it all day, everyday on our phones. “about:blank” is Nadia’s series reflecting not just on our visual ADHD but on what the mysterious machines behind social media are making us want, or think we want, and what that means for art appreciation. How about the artist as a postdigitalist algorithm, an online magpie curating a found line, shape, and color to generate an analogue version of the digital stream of information. Nadia’s work is a full-scale rebellion against the smoke and mirrors of social media, the artwork makes the virtual vibrant. Nadia takes an old-fashioned needle and neatly sews it all together. The work is generative in that it’s a remix of some other artworks. Its narrative structure is set up to tell a new story every time you see it, depending on where you start. 428 Precondition Required This painting is driven by the word “MUSE”. The word “muse” stems from Greek and Roman mythology, used to describe goddesses who preside over artistic disciplines. Today the word refers to a person who serves as an artist's source of inspiration ― traditionally, a role reserved for women. The empty chair painted in white and black, as a 2D element is a metaphor for the muse that had a very important role in modern art and classical art, and it is dissolving in the digital one. This is set to make a point between the printed and the digital era. The chair is looking directly at the digital installation; the chair is a classic library chair (a vintage LA library chair) where books used to be stored underneath in a shelve made for them. This is set to make a point between the printed and the digital era. In “THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE THEORY” by Marshall McLuhan (1964) he proposes that a medium itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study, as the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of our- selves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs. For McLuhan, it was the medium itself that shaped and controlled "the scale and form of human association and action”. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. In our digital age, we can be at the same time perfectly virtually connected and perfectly physically isolated. By “being online” using any social or web platform, there is a new environment created that allows a new array of possibilities nonexistent previously to that medium. As total darkness will come after dawn if the light bulb was not invented, the exposure that we had to art was limited before the explosion of social media. Not that before we were in total darkness, we did have a lantern…but now is like the sun doesn’t even set. Would the result of our art be the same? Would we be reflecting on the same subjects? Would we be tempted to try or incorporate certain techniques into our art processes? In Understanding Media, McLuhan describes the "content" of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. This means that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. This is linked to the whole concept of these series as I am reflecting on how technology affects the art creation. How this affects the art process as well as the final artwork interests me in the sense of how a machine/algorithm is deciding what content you see and in what order, as well as avoiding certain other. The top left of the painting shows 2 hands creating a figure that can only be recreated by its shadow. This is appropriated from the cover of the book “Playing and Reality by Winnicott ”(1971), where he writes on his theories about what are the origins of creativity and how can we develop it, and it also tackles the fundamental issue of the individual self and its relationship with the outside world. This concept is linked to the words “muse” as a comparison between imagination and reality, the creation and the recreated. The shadow or result of the projection against the light by the 2 hands is not incorporated in the painting, but it is represented by different abstract compositions. The stars on top of them are meant to be the rate for the total originality of one’s creativity. The painting is surrounded by white and blue figures where only the hands are depicted clearly, hands that point, as every artwork is compared to previous or similar ones. The HTTP 428 Precondition Required response status code indicates that the server requires the request to be conditional. Typically, this means that a required precondition header is missing. This is linked to the “missing muse” vs the “mass media muse” concept. The title of the artworks comes from HTTP status response codes. The codes are standard response codes given by website servers and are sometimes called internet error codes. Naming the paintings with these codes I wanted to create a bond between them and the conceptualization of these series. As the code that titles these series “about:blank” displays a blank page when the browser has nothing else to show, the title of each painting is named after a different response code given by a website when an error happens. Painting composed of 7 different canvases sewed together. Painted on the sides, so no need to frame it. Signed at the back of the painting, and delivered stretched and ready to hang. The chair that appears in the installation pictures is a complement of the painting, if interested it has to be sent separately and the shipping cost will be added but it is included in the price of the painting.

Painting:Acrylic on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:67 W x 59 H x 1.4 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.