Filling Space: Scan Art
Interview with mixed media artist. Discussing everything between the origins of scan art, unrequited love and gratitude.
Kami is a Toronto-based mixed media artist. In 2021 she re-discovered scan art and launched her own Etsy store Ohsheshoots featuring moody digital prints and physical posters.
Ohsheshoots discovered the art form in high school photography class when their teacher held a scan session. A decade later, stuck at home feeling lost in the humdrum of corporate life and unrequited love, she re-discovered scan art. Noticing withering flowers that were sent by an old friend, she wondered how best to preserve them.
“What do I have around here that I can scan? I don’t want these flowers but I don’t want to throw them away…” — Ohsheshoots
And thus the first print was born.
As for the process, she described it simply: “I’m sitting in pitch darkness, closing the lid on the scanner.”
What draws you in with scan art, is the haunting images. The eerie black background that gives the illusion of objects floating through black water or space.
This unique art medium has origins in the late 60s when early artists used office photocopiers to create art. Manipulation and close control of the objects on the scanner screen, create a flipped image. The result is typically a collage of detailed bright objects swimming in a dark background. Scan art shows the ingenuity of all artists and creatives. Without the artist’s perspective, objects are just things, but when rearranged on a canvas, they are reborn as something special.
Scan art at its core, is a very basic process. You pick up a few objects and place them on a scanner like Van Gogh with a photocopier. The result is striking. You stare at all corners of the page trying to figure out what you’re looking at and appreciating all the detail. It’s like seeing the cross-section of a lemon under a microscope. It satisfies a strange curiosity that we all posses.
In a deeper sense, scan art is a reflection of the digital world we inhabit today. Real people being pushed against a frame, right up against the glass, for our viewing pleasure. For us to gawk, criticize, admire, obsess, pick apart and finally take a piece with us, to copy and emulate.
But not everything sticks. Sometimes a scanner is just a scanner. An object from the corporate world that has been added to our day to day lives. Anyone can own one. But what we create with it is up to the person. Like the phone camera in everyone’s pocket. At the end of the day we are all scan artists. Scanning ourselves, our faces and personalities. Hanging them up on a wall of endless portraits in an infinite gallery of junk and treasure that we are stuck walking through infinitely.
