In The Metaverse AI Powers Infinite Travel
Acrylic and Posca Pen on Canvas, 73 × 99 cm, 2024
 
Artwork Statement
My practice examines how contemporary life is increasingly dispersed across digital systems, where attention, identity, labour, and access are mediated through platforms, networks, and data flows. In this context, the question Where do we go from here? becomes less about physical movement and more about how we navigate layered and unequal conditions of existence.
Through painting, I respond to these conditions by creating spaces for pause, reflection, and ambiguity. Rather than offering solutions, my work invites viewers to reconsider their position within accelerated technological systems that often reduce human experience to information, output, or visibility. I am interested in how art can resist these pressures by holding space for imagination, critique, and emotional complexity.
For me, a distributed world does not only signify fragmentation or loss. It can also become a site of reconfiguration, where new forms of agency, connection, and meaning emerge. My work aligns with this possibility by insisting on the continued relevance of poetry, culture, and human reflection within increasingly mediated worlds.
 
Artist Bio
Alessia Catalano is a Melbourne-based emerging artist currently completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a major in Drawing at RMIT University. Her practice explores the intersections of memory, media, and digital culture through hand-painted and digitally inflected imagery. Influenced by pop art, retro aesthetics, and artists such as Raymond Pettibon and Roy Lichtenstein, she uses humour and abstraction to question how technology reshapes communication, image-making, and personal history.