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JANNA AVNER
Janna Avner creates oil paintings and video works that respond to new Janna cofounded FEMMEBIT, a digital art technologies and current events. Janna’s festival celebrating female-identifying paintings depict digital art by working artists based in Los Angeles. Janna’s with refraction gradients and reflective artworks and curations have been covered mediums that imitate the glow of by Vice/Creators Project, Hyperallergic, computer screens. Her future series LA Weekly, Artforum, and ArtNews. Janna will address the complexities of identity has also been a guest speaker for UCLA’s and origin through internet culture and Digital Media Arts Department (2017), and virtual spaces. the New York Times School (2019). Her . writings on Artificial Intelligence were selected for “What Future: The Year’s Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate, and Reinvent Our Future,” a 2017 best-of-anthology considered by Smithsonian Magazine as one of the best science books of the year. Janna graduated from Yale University in 2012 and is a Master of Arts candidate at California State University Northridge.
"The oil painting TFW Sick of Fake News depicts a White House in a Faulknerian state of decay, a Southern gothic overrun by bougainvillea—controlled by giant internet trolls peddling false and misleading claims and feeding on misinformation that destabilizes democracies. Democracy dies in the darkness, and fake news is that very darkness. This painting is not a hypothetical outcome, but rather a dream, a Hollywood backdrop held up by wooden posts subtly depicted in the piece. By definition a painting is an illusion, a tromp l’oeil, (Trump-lie), a deepfake.
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TFW Sick of Fake News, 2020, Oil on Panel
Eradicating fake news is like playing whack-a-mole, when one site is taken down, another one pops up again. Technologists at The Verge explains that fake news’s dissemination and perniciousness is similar to that of a virus. What happens when voters are misinformed by slanted reportage—when information that’s useful is confused and twisted against itself, when information is politicized? Catastrophizing aside, are there not repercussions? TFW Sick of Fake News, depicts an alarming hypothetical outcome.”
--Janna Avner
