COWBOY WASABI

Upon graduating college in the late nineties, Tennessee Loveless received a piece of revolutionary technology: a "digital camera." The first available model on the market was the Sony Mavica — a one-megapixel brick of a device, worn with a leather strap, that used 3.5" floppy disks in place of film. The notion that a picture could be taken and seen immediately was, at the time, extraordinary. For years the camera stayed close at hand, as Loveless obsessively documented the people and places passing through view. Even as technology moved on to memory cards and higher resolutions, the Mavica remained the tool of choice — an attachment rooted as much in nostalgia as in the strange intimacy of storing memories on floppy disks.

 

Twenty years later, while transferring those disks to a laptop for what would be the final time, Loveless saw an opportunity: to give the images a second life as paintings. Across his body of work, the aim has always been to forge new, integral connections between artist and viewer through story. Painting onto a substrate built from encapsulated memories felt like a natural extension of that pursuit.

 

Each art piece in Cowboy Wasabi is a painting containing the original digital photographs taken while Loveless lived in Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles from 1999 - 2008. The series takes its name from the very first image captured on that camera — an awkward selfie taken in a cowboy hat inside a sushi restaurant somewhere outside Atlanta, in 1999.