Homages: A Passenger Here (After Julien)
Homages is a series of new works made by training custom AI models on the oeuvres of several of Esherick’s favorite contemporary artists. Ranging from painters and photographers to conceptual and digital artists, the results span mediums, approaches, and identities. Together these unique artworks paint a dizzying vision of artistic authorship in which style becomes malleable material and identity becomes fluid.
In doing so, they straddle the border between devotion and appropriation. Like the greats of appropriation art—Sturtevant, Levine, Prince, et al.—Esherick pokes and prods at originality and authorship, raising questions. He has, for example, invited each homaged artist to sign “their” works, receiving his share of the sales proceeds for it in return. But rather than a taunt or a dare (though recognizing its provocative nature), the gesture is a genuine invitation to imagine and partake in new forms of art-making being opened up by our rapidly changing technocultural environment.
It’s in this sincerity that the Homages cross over into the realm of the devotional. Esherick selected each artist out of a deep appreciation for their work, spending countless hours learning about them in an effort to understand the way they see the world and engage with their practice. Through this process, he imagines what we often dismissively call "style" not as a mere surface, but as a substantive aesthetic language that structures every facet of our worldview. The Homages suggest that such aesthetic languages, or facsimiles thereof, are replicable now, but that precisely for this reason they must be cherished, protected, and reinvigorated—they are too precious to lose. Replicable does not mean replaceable, and where these works succeed in replicating, they fail to replace.
What, then, remains irreplaceable, and how can we keep the irreplaceable alive? Do presence and aura still have a place in a digital society? As the contrasting threads of appropriation and devotion weave together to color these works, we’re left with a string of challenging questions like these in their wake. What happens to artists whose style is taken from them? Those who do the taking? Can style be owned in the first place? How does our relationship to style evolve when it can be generated infinitely? What importance does the human hand have now, when so far removed from its creations? And how does the role of the artist change under all of these shifting conditions? If, per Sontag, the artist is truly the “exemplary sufferer,” then the questions raised by Homages pertain to us all—the artists are just being asked first.
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Original oil painting on canvas, stretched, signed on back, 12 x 12 in.
Kevin Esherick, 2025
This token represents the ownership over the unique, original painting, to be claimed by the token holder. Upon resale on the secondary market, the original shall be shipped to the new owner. The receiver of the work will cover shipping costs.
