Artist Statement

​

Van Gogh's famous painting looks different in every reproduction you find online. The colors range wildly, the cropping varies every now and again, and some sites embed watermarks on the painting, claiming ownership over something that does not actually belong to them. What's more, many of the images that you will find when Googling Starry Night don't actually feature the painting at all, but reproductions, copies, fakes, and homages. The painting itself probably looks different than it did when it was first produced, due to color disintegration, but of course, unless you happen to be standing in the Museum of Modern Art, you're not really looking at the painting at all. Just an image on a screen or in a book.

​

This four-and-a-half-minute video features four images that all claim to be Starry Night. As you watch one transition into the other, you will notice that they do not perfectly align, and are remarkably different from one another.

 

This work addresses how images as sources of information change in appearance, context, and meaning as they circulate over time, how we claim ownership over images, the oversaturation of images on the internet, and how unreliable photographs are as representations of something in the real world.

​

Ultimately, as the title suggests, there is no such thing as Starry Night.

​

​