An jarringly colorful abstraction built from images of a terra cotta portrait sculpture, an ancient roman marble bust, and the back of a person’s head in a digital photo.
Dataset: Terra Cotta, Marble, Jpeg, 2025
Oil and Spray Paint on Canvas
14 x 18 in / 35.56 x 45.72 cm
Brooklyn-based artist Peter Walsh presents his first exhibition with IFAC Arts, Dataset Hallucinations, hosted at The Yard Lower East Side. The exhibition confronts how we see—and how we are seen—in a world increasingly shaped by surveillance, artificial intelligence, and media saturation.
Walsh’s paintings compress crowds, fragment faces, and recombine memory and history into images that echo the glitches of machine vision yet remain grounded in the materiality of paint. By slowing down digital speed, he makes visible how recognition and truth have become provisional, unstable, and contested.
Rather than adopting AI tools, Walsh responds to them through painting—translating the logics of datasets, glitches, and surveillance into figuration, abstraction, and layered revision. His refusal to use automation becomes a form of resistance: asserting touch, duration, and embodiment in a culture defined by frictionless systems.
Dataset Hallucinations situates painting as both mirror and critique. Walsh reveals the fractures of contemporary perception, transforming them into critical reflection on how technology reshapes subjectivity, public life, and collective vision.
Onview through November 8, 2025 at IFAC Lower East Side.
About the Artist
Peter Walsh (b. 1962) is an interdisciplinary artist living in Brooklyn. His work spans painting, performance, video installation, writing, and curating, unified by a commitment to public space, the body, and social structures. Walsh’s projects have been shown across the United States, Puerto Rico, the UK, and Slovenia, with site-specific works in Central Park, Hyde Park, San Juan, and at the Unisphere in Queens. He was co-founder of the Baltimore-based arts journal Linkand a recipient of one of the final NEA artist fellowships in 1995.