Instagram as Gallery
Julia Martin, Overshare Detail, iPhone photos printed as polaroids with text, 2017.
As we prepared for the launch of Nosy Mag, I realized that, time and again, the artists we discussed were referenced through their Instagram account. Their account was the way we kept in touch with them and kept up-to-date with their work.
It's not a new revelation that Instagram has affected artists and the art world. It is also no secret that Instagram can have a negative impact: soaking-up time and affecting mental health. In 2021, still in the thick of the pandemic, the pitfalls and potential of Instagram are heightened; every artist's corner of the online realm has as much potential as the traditional gallery.
There are dozens of articles about how artists should be using Instagram… This article won't be one. So then, how to present this article in a manner that skirts the obvious and explores the potential? This discussion will flow through an examination of the practices of four artists who use Instagram in different ways: as a business, a medium, and a conceptual space. I want to present their experiences and insights and, along the way, pluck some tidbits of knowledge on how to approach online platforms, and get a picture of how Instagram is changing creative life.
I first spoke with Julia Martin, an Ottawa-based interdisciplinary artist. Having taught courses on social media and the arts at the University of Ottawa, Martin’s work often deals with social media's connotations. For this reason, she was the ideal artist to ignite the conversation.
Combining narrative with autobiography, Julia's work is at once intensely personal, introspective, and boiling with dark humour. She tells stories that are grounded in personal experience, and is interested in what is shared between us; our human experiences, our references, and the images we see and take ourselves. She plays with the vernacular of online images, taking their familiarity and shifting their meaning through sequencing images differently and playing with word and image. In her Overshare (2017) installation, iPhone photos printed out as polaroids and a wall text examine the phone as "an archive, an imprint of the self."
Julia Martin, Overshare Detail, iPhone photos printed as polaroids with text, 2017.
Julia describes Instagram as "a weirdly perfect marriage." Her autobiographical mode of working fits in with the structure of Instagram as a quasi real-life sharing platform. Her account is a work on its own, in the medium that is Instagram; it is almost a diary of sorts, evolving over time. Her account is a snapshot of Julia, of her story, but it is fragmented and cut off, selective, like all online presence.
Followers are not something Julia seeks out. Having a small engaged audience is perfect. Julia's Instagram is also largely an experimentation place and a foundation of her practice outside the digital realm: "It's like a small venue comedy club," as she describes it. Julia's process involves making and experimenting, then fusing these experiments into a whole. Using Instagram, she gauges the success of these experiences by putting herself in the shoes of a viewer, getting a distanced perspective on her work. Out of this testing, ground narratives grow and get fine-tuned for exhibitions.
I asked Julia what pointers she would give a creative maker using social media. Even though the approach varies depending on one’s goals, she says:
" Know who you are, write it down to remind yourself, and try not to compromise those elements of your individualism and what you want to achieve in your practice. [...] Take stock of what you want from social media and then set up actions based around what you want to achieve. Have a good, firm idea of what you are trying to get out of Instagram. Otherwise, you're going to lose yourself."
Be aware of the pitfalls before sharing so much of your work, and be strategic in what you show:
"For some artists, especially young artists, they're too responsive to an audience that is skewed because of their following, and they're being led astray because of the likes or lack thereof, and they might abandon something that is really good because they didn't get what they wanted."
"You're straddling a very careful line between being a real person, and creating engagement based on the fact that you're a real person, and still maintaining your private humanity. It can be a careful line, it's one you have to set for yourself."
Julia goes on to stress the importance of finding new creative uses for the tools available on social media sites:
"I've seen writers use Twitter to get writing jobs, comedy gigs. With every new tool at your disposal, I mean as Instagram cannibalizes other platforms, [...] There are so many ways to use a platform's tools and medium as a stepping stone. You could release a short film across reels or IGTV. Even Youtube has been used for this purpose."
Julia Martin, Unmotivational poster from You Are Talking to Yourself…2014, original text, found/altered/original images 2014.
Julia states that 2020 presents the Canadian art world with the opportunity to reevaluate how it operates. This year we have seen that an artist's online presence is not that much different than a gallery's. Social media can be a venue to innovate with, or to just exhibit work. (If used effectively, do we still really need the commercial gallery?) Because of this shift in autonomy towards the artist, we are presented with an opportunity to reevaluate the criteria that galleries and institutions use in awarding funding and exhibitions. Julia explains, "So much about having a show has to do with privilege, having transportation, money to make work, money to frame work, money to rent equipment." With the social movements of 2020 and the pandemic's various challenges, our institutions and galleries have the chance to adapt to the reality of artists today and reconsider who and what they exhibit.
Julia’s insights lay out the groundwork for thinking about Instagram and social media. She offers a prism through which we can see the following artists and reflect on how we use social media.
Elly Smallwood, Fever Dreams, oil on canvas 2019.
Elly Smallwood’s practice takes a very different route than Julia’s. Elly is a painter that has refined a stellar painterly touch and technique. Her gestural portraits and figure paintings drip with the physicality of paint. The surfaces of her paintings are supreme, well-balanced physical strokes paired with loose, airy moments. Her paintings communicate. There is a visceral feeling evoked in her works, sitting on the tip of your tongue as you take them in. The figures in her paintings are charged; their expressions and body language communicate on an emotional level. She paints quickly and boldly, never over-rendering. Her paintings are pared down to essentials. Her motion and action in painting mix with that of the subject matter, heightening their ability to communicate.
Elly's paintings deal with raw emotions chronicling intimacy, the body, vulnerability, and sexuality. All punctuated by moments of intensity. Her works straddle the line between aesthetic beauty and emotional intensity, complicating and collapsing the distance between these poles. Describing her work, she says, "The things I'm aiming to capture I don't have words for, or I'm not really able to capture in words, which is I guess the reason to paint them."
When she started as a painter, social media wasn't a business tool; it remained a way to share images with friends and family. Posting paintings on Facebook, she got some initial feedback, but "up until that point, no one had really seen my art, and I was operating on the assumption that no one would like it." A popular Facebook art page took her work and used it as their profile picture without crediting Elly. She describes it as an anxiety-filled experience, seeing so much feedback about the work anonymously.
For Elly, the driving force behind using social media has always been about sharing her paintings. Over time, Instagram has fueled Elly's career, and it has allowed her to make a living from her work, exhibit and sell it, and run workshops around the world. Speaking about Instagram, Elly says that she doesn't think about it too much beyond her goal of sharing work. She describes seeing many people get pulled into the negatives by dwelling too heavily on Instagram. She also brings up the critical issue of how Instagram can affect the work that you make, influencing aesthetics or content:
"I think Instagram does subconsciously affect the work you want to make, especially [in terms of] the validation, but it's unfortunate because the validation is never really positive. Even when people react really well to something, I don't really take that in as much as I do when something does really badly. But there is a part of me that is actively trying to make works even if people don't like them."
Elly Smallwood, Momentary, 2016 Oil on canvas.
Elly's Instagram account functions as a fusion. It is her work, and crucially, Elly’s account is also a view of her life, interests, and personality. The integration of social media and art-related content forms a comfortable and intimate setting for her paintings. Looking at how Elly displays work, you notice the importance of staging and composing the photographs featuring her paintings, showing the space in which the paintings live. Speaking about Instagram as a business, she says:
"I always keep in mind interactions I've had with businesses online […] I want it to be a pleasant experience when someone has bought something from me […] I want to sound like a human, that is professional."
"I like seeing people's works in progress and I like seeing artists with their paintings, artist's studios, where they work. [...] I think what images do I connect to? And I try to post those things. I recommend that people post works they're not proud of and kind of be honest and be yourself."
Elly has utilized her platform in a positive manner, highlighting work by young artists and branching out into workshops via Patreon. She tailors each tutorial based on what her patrons want, ranging from anatomy lessons, packaging and shipping work, and of course, painting.
She explains that the art world's gatekeeping isn't as pronounced now: gallerists, dealers, and curators don't all hold the keys. Elly's paintings of female sexuality were explicitly rejected by gallerists early in her career, but Instagram has given Elly autonomy; she presents her work and runs her career how she chooses.
Andrew Beck, Reflection, oil on canvas 2020.
Andrew Beck’s paintings are moments of frozen action. Mid-century architecture and figures populate spaces at once peaceful that lean into uncertainty, a looming feeling that something seems close by, outside the picture's edge or timeframe. He is keenly interested in paint handling, atmosphere, and the possibilities contained in painting.
"Instagram has a pressure to it. Sometimes it's good a pressure to get work done."
Other times Andrew says, Instagram is a nagging presence to keep posting. "It has an influence over you. Remember you’re in charge, not Instagram. Make sure it's a tool working for you." Andrew believes the anonymity of the platform can allow honest feedback about specific works: "If you post a study that's successful, it gives you a feel for whether it could be a successful painting on a larger scale or not."
Andrew notices trends develop quickly among painters online; these trends can range from using a specific paint colour to subject matter or painting style. "Be careful not to jump on the bandwagon of Instagram trends, to keep your work fresh," he says, adding, "be mindful not to be overly influenced by what you see." Artists he's noticed, himself (early in his career) included, tend to emulate aspects of five or six artists, thus forming a mashup.
"Your audience as a painter is just yourself, really."
Andrew Beck, Messenger, oil on board 2019.
Andrew is planning to use social media to advertise his next show, displaying work digitally rather than at a local gallery. Because he lives in Ottawa, he wants to be responsible for showing his paintings here while continuing to work with galleries that will market his paintings elsewhere. He intends to have a pop-up show in Ottawa in the coming year. He uses his Instagram as a promotion tool to get in touch with collectors and build hype around his work. Again, just like Julia and Elly, he is using Instagram to bridge into the real.
Mercedes Ventura, Instagram screenshot. 2021.
Aesthetically, Mercedes Ventura draws from internet history, mining internet culture and vaporwave. She sees this aesthetic impulse as a natural development which occurred as she began thinking about Instagram as a medium. It "felt right," she says. "I was talking about digital culture as I was being part of digital culture." Her work is thoroughly internet in its sense of its hybridity; for example, she will play a 17th-century character, but wearing contemporary clothing or with an 80's vibe. This hybrid fusion follows the form of the internet, where the possibilities for combining and recombining are endless.
Mercedes's Thirst Trap (2018) works are a prime example of her practice. These pieces, created for physical and virtual presentation, take internet slang literally, parodying the much-memed euphemism of a thirst trap, a social media post meant to arouse and excite the users who come across it. Here, a trap is baited with beer. She flips the male gaze, and again is talking about internet culture by using the internet.
Mercedes Ventura, Thirst Trap, digital photograph, 2018.
Mercedes tells me she is interested in slippages of perception; how her perception of an event or herself differs from others' perceptions. She follows this idea by discussing how Instagram has created para-social relationships where people orbit her account: "There are people that I have never met but they watch all my stuff […] they know so much about me, they know inner parts of my life."
Mercedes has used portraiture for its critical potential while also exploring her Guatemalan history and culture. In her La Loteria series, she examines and adds complexity and nuance to Latina stereotypes. Having these critical portraits online, she is a part of the dialogue and can communicate and discuss the works directly with viewers. This ability for communication is important in Mercedes's practice; it's a way of connecting, being open, vulnerable, and sharing experiences with others. Overall, Mercedes's work is thoroughly fresh and exciting; she addresses critical issues with a playful and colourful force while exploring the potential of Instagram as a medium and conceptual space.
Mercedes Ventura from the La Loteria Series, La virgen, Digital photo, 2016.
If you're like me, you'll be thinking long and hard about your own vapid art Instagram account at this point. You are probably also one of the few people that has read this many of my words simultaneously. I think people often consider Instagram as a business arm for an artist (which it can be) but there is so much potential in thinking about it as an extension of your practice, as a medium, as a digital conceptual space. Thinking about Instagram as a medium offers a point of departure during the pandemic—At a time when everything in the real remains limited, using the characteristics of Instagram as a medium can be a way to carve something unique, innovative, and positive. Whichever approach is taken by you, dear artist, there are ways to use Instagram towards achieving your goal. I think artists must consider if Instagram is a positive force in their life and career, and build from there. Perhaps this means adjusting your approach, or perhaps getting off of the platform; only you know what works for you. Whatever method is used, it's crucial that your work is true to how you want it to be. Instagram is a tool after all, and it should sit quietly on the shelf, like a hammer, for the times when you need it and the times when you don’t.
Julia Martin
Elly Smallwood
Andrew Beck
Mercedes Ventura