Arriving in the States, she experienced industry as aristocracy, “industries,” she says, “like this new technology” – the kind that makes painting with robotic dogs a reality.Īnieszka Pilat and a Spot in the studio, 2022. Figure portraiture, which Pilat studied at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, has long represented power and aristocracy in society. Poland has a long history of aristocracy. The transition from portraiture to robotic installation art isn’t that big of a jump when she explains it. It would be hard to deny the parallels between her real-life journey and that of her artistic practice, especially given how her roots spill over into her work today. She’s well aware that these symbolic representations stemmed from her younger days in Poland and were reiterated in the US, where she saw our cultural synonymy of technology and power. So technology became that for me.”Īnieszka Pilat with two Spots at the National Gallery of Victoria Triennial announcement in Melbourne, Australia, 2023.
It was like a symbol of liberal democracy and a better future. And this car was such a symbol of freedom for us. “When the wall came down when I was a young teenager, the first thing my father got was a car. “Everything was falling apart, including technology,” she says. As an immigrant from Eastern Poland, she grew up behind the Iron Curtain, isolated from the industrial, technological, and ideological developments outside of communism. But some artists are more willing to part with old practices and experiment with what’s new, oftentimes the kind of person who has needed to do that outside of art. Across the board, there was immense pressure to take part in the NFT money grab of 2021, and now with AI and autonomous work. The pressure for artists to adapt or reinvent their practice is palpable among the rapid technological advancements of our era. In Pilat’s eyes, painting competes with the camera and generative AI competes with both, allowing the public to take matters into their own hands with the ease of prompt-to-image creation. Even with her background, Pilat is willing to laugh off the institutional hierarchy of form and admit that she’s “kind of in the play” after all, and grateful for it.Īnieszka Pilat with a Spot in New York City, 2022. As tough as it may be for a classically-trained portrait painter to admit, Pilat’s practice has changed alongside her medium and ventured into the world of performance, requiring viewers’ knowledge of the process, not just the product. And when people see her with her robots, they do approach, asking questions that can spark a broader conversation. She points out that a woman in a bright color like yellow offers a kind of approachability that, say, a man dressed in black, wouldn’t.
When taken at face value, we are unable to understand her relationship to the Boston Dynamics dog beside her, the thought process behind both being in yellow – first, to comfort people that the robot belongs to a human, and second, of course, for the aesthetic – and consideration of what kind of signal it gives in a public space. Such a futuristic scene can be jarring, particularly when both figures are flattened to a piece of visual art. Living in polarizing times supports binary thinking – things are either good or evil, right or wrong, exciting or distressing – the kind of quick judgment Polish artist Agnieszka Pilat has gotten used to when people see her work online, something she calls “a comic book response.” Seeing a still photo of Pilat and a canine sidekick walking side-by-side down the streets of New York City, both adorned in the same shade of yellow, already reads as something out of a graphic novel.
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