By Ben Bloch
Sponsored by S.L.A.M.
- 15 framed acrylic paintings, plus 7 training canvas set (optional)
- Size: 41″ x 40″ – 55″ x 42.5″
- Crates: 3, 48″ x 46″ x 26″ – 58″ x 46″ x 22″
- Availability: January 2027 – December 2029
- Booking Fee: 4 – 6 weeks $750/ 7 – 12 weeks $900
- Integrative Resources: Education curriculum, artist talk, workshops, presentations, pre-fab social media posts.
EXHIBITION DESCRIPTION
Make Me a Landscape, Do Not Include Any Sky explores the relationship between art, nature, and technology in the developing age of artificial intelligence. In collaboration with fellow artist and programmer John Brownell (of Missoula), I used a collection of my Montana landscape paintings to train a custom closed-circuit image diffusion AI model tuned exclusively to the style of my landscapes, and capable of generating images from text prompts. I wondered, what would happen if I reversed the feedback loop and re-rendered them in paint on canvas? What could AI—which is, after all, a human creation—tell us about our own human designs? From hundreds of outputs, I selected the most striking to re-render in my own hand. This series is the result. The show—comprising approximately 15 paintings, educational texts, and time-lapse videos of their creation—presents several advantages as a MAGDA traveling exhibition:
• The work is deeply rooted in Montana. The diffusion model was trained on my paintings of Montana landscapes, producing imagery that I subsequently translated back into handmade paintings. The Missoulian’s Cory Walsh wrote an article about art and AI featuring the exhibition as it was recently shown in Salt Lake City (my website includes a PDF of the article that is behind a firewall in the Missoulian).
• It is comprised of 15 or so paintings that are already completed, professionally framed, and ready to hang, and of a scale that presents well on walls, while at the same time being fairly easy to transport. These may be accompanied by original landscapes that were part of the training set.
• The concept behind them is a nice balance between contemporary experimentation and traditional painting practice.
• There is an educational aspect which sparks interest across all ages and groups, and generates conversation around the topic of AI and the arts (in Salt Lake City, the show was written up in several community publications that don’t ordinarily review art shows, and I also had both high school and college students reach out to do reporting on it, and was invited to speak on a local radio station a couple of times).
• For further information and press coverage, see https://www.benbloch.com/make-me-a-landscape
Artist Biography Ben Bloch is an artist living and working between Montana and Utah. He earned MFAs in Painting and Creative Writing from the University of Montana in 2002. Before deciding to focus on landscape painting, he was a co-founder of the arts collaborative Goatsilk, running an experimental gallery by the same name in Missoula from 2002-2004. Bloch was a visiting professor at Whitman College from 2005-2010, and maintains studios in Cameron, Montana, and Salt Lake City, Utah. Bloch’s work has been featured and/or written about in the UK Guardian, Hyperallergic.com, Aspect: The Chronicle of New Media Art, Public Art Dialogue, and G4TV’s Attack of the Show. In 2016 Bloch was selected by an NEA-funded state project to be a Montana Artist-in-Residence in Virginia City, Montana. His paintings have been exhibited nationally, and across Montana at such venues as the Missoula Art Museum and the Dana Gallery in Missoula, The Holter Museum in Helena, the Northwestern Energy Building in Butte, and the Bozeman and West Yellowstone Public Libraries.
MAGDA 