Craig Ames – Maurizio Grandi

winner of the Intarget Photolux Award: A.I.

Location: Palazzo Guinigi, Via Guinigi, 29

Opening days and hours:
Monday – Thursday from 15:00 to 19:00
Friday – Sunday from 10:00 to 19:00

Parallel Landscapes
Maurizo Grandi

The COVID-19 crisis has shown that humanity has the ability to adapt to any situation. I depicted an uchronic world with large floods caused by climate change, where life, despite everything, continues in an apparent normality.
As a setting I chose universally known places, easily recognizable by the viewer and comparable with his imagination.
My goal is to make these images absolutely real, photographic, creating a collaboration between photography and post-photography through AI, through a series of technical steps that alternate prompts and actual photographic processing, thus creating non-repeatable images.

BIOGRAPHY
Video editor and photographer, three novels and a collection of short stories published. I have always been attracted to researching models of visual perception outside the ordinary human experience, often pursuing metaphysical atmospheres. This is not out of an aesthetic quirk, but because reality, observed from unseen points of view, can show truths that are otherwise unintelligible. To achieve this I informally use photography or video, or a combination of both. In 2018 I was featured in IMAGE MAG, a prestigious large format magazine edited by
Mosè Franchi, writer, journalist and photography historian. In 2020 I met Denis Curti, one of the most important Italian and international photography critics, and also curator of Sotheby’s first photography auction in Milan, who noticed some of my photographs and we began working together.
At the turn of 2021, I took part in a collective exhibition organised in his gallery in Milan, STILL, which currently exhibits two of my works.

Gloryland
Craig Ames

Welcome to ‘Gloryland’; an absurd and isolated realm, steeped in the myths and trappings of its long and turbulent past. It is a land where progressive policies and visionary thinking have been supplanted by backwards-looking, narrowly defined narratives that extol the broken promises of a return to greatness. Dispensing with the lessons of history, it is a divided land of febrile angst and folly; where populist, self-serving politicians peddle nostalgic-laden snake oil tonics, served with grotesque portions of faux patriotic sentiment. Reflecting the nation’s frayed state through the disturbingly clichéd and distorted lens of AI generative imaging, the individual image titles in this satirical narrative series are ironically repurposed from Shakespeare’s famous epithets from his landmark play, Richard II.

BIOGRAFIA
Craig Ames is a British artist with an interest in expanded forms of evidence, simulation and representation in the age of post-photography / post-truth. Understanding these interconnected themes, he has a diverse practice and works with a wide range of media, including photography, generative artificial intelligence, text and online source material. Ames’ fascination with photography began when he trained as an evidence photographer whilst serving in the British Army. In recent years, his focus has shifted to exploring generative AI and the monumental technical advancements, as well as the growing ethical concerns we are currently witnessing with the mainstream adoption of contemporary AI imaging algorithms. His work has been exhibited internationally at Copenhagen Photo Festival (Denmark); Thessaloniki Photo Biennale, (Greece); Landskrona Foto (Sweden); Earth Photo, London (UK); and Lishui Photo Festival, (China). He has a BA (Hons) in Editorial Photography and a MA in Photography.