07/04/2026
Upcoming Show: We Are Still Here by Jessica Driver
In We Are Still Here, Jess turns to oil paint and canvas to ask what it means to be present in an age of accelerating unreality. Working from source images gathered online, some photographs of real people, others generated entirely by artificial intelligence, she confronts a question with no clean answer: how do we know the difference anymore? The faces in these works are knowingly blurred, smeared across the picture plane as if caught mid-dissolve. Identity does not vanish all at once. It drifts slowly.
“We live in a world that insists it is more connected than ever. And yet at the centre of it all, something is dissolving. We have more information than any generation before us, but less certainty about what is true.”
The urgency behind these paintings is not merely philosophical. The machines driving our new world require vast, hidden sacrifice: rivers rerouted to cool data centres, mountains stripped for silver and rare earth, ecosystems traded quietly for processing power. The human cost is subtler but no less real. Screens proliferate and attention fragments. A generation trades the physical world, piece by piece, for a digital one. We speak of a mental health crisis in terms of numbers and policies, but Jess paints it as a felt experience, the deliberate, slow blurring of the self, the face that no longer quite resolves.
And yet the body persists. Throughout these works, figures stand, gather, hold one another. The flesh is warm, the paint is generous. There is grief here, but also tenderness, a refusal to mourn what has not yet been lost. These are portraits of people who are still here, still reaching, even as the world they inhabit flickers at the edges.
April 11 - May 2
Opening Reception: April 18 2-4pm
West End Art Space
112 Adderley Street
West Melbourne
3003
