In the Untitled, Meters series Aoun seeks to address the status of image and data in the current digital media environment, with their attendant ideology of dematerialization and augmented reality. Her work revels in this paradoxical juncture, where the materiality of images reasserts itself a way to counteract digital dematerialization of everyday life. The unique print makes use of a digital transfer film that seeks to hybridize digital printing technology with that of the darkroom. In this work, Aoun acts almost as a product tester, treating this material as a prototype, seeing what unintended possibilities it may yield. Yet, Aoun achieves highly reflective surfaces by continually feeding the digital transfer film through her printer, at times impatiently tearing the sheet away, maximizing the expressive potential of the printer’s malfunction. The point is not simply that such a mechanized process can produce the sort of abstraction that has historically stood to represent the metaphysical, or some deep, internal sensation. Rather the work has to do with the rapidly changing nature of image making – in a variation on the sublime its subject extends ceaselessly outwards, and into a rich, complex dialectic about the convergent forces which contribute to contemporary image making.

Caline Aoun was born in 1983 in Lebanon and currently lives and works in Beirut. Her work addresses the changeability and the undercurrents of the hidden material and physical world. The seemingly solid and permanent spaces of our lives are not static, but they are made of various events that are kept hidden. Aoun encapsulates these hidden events by revealing how the continuous accumulation of matter essentially changes what we see. As we constantly find ways to move through the material, natural, social, and symbolic environments of our lives, they are in fact constantly changing and evolving.