Elena
Ernst
15.10. - 04.11.2026
In my artistic practice of drawing, I engage with media surfaces, with my perspective being shaped to a significant extent by my undergraduate studies in media studies. From this media-philosophical standpoint, I am particularly interested in a development within the history of new media: media formats increasingly foreground atmospheric elements, while narrative structures recede into the background. A clearly articulated story is often replaced by a mood that colors and structures what we perceive. This mood is not an unnoticed or incidental element; rather, it becomes a central component of the media experience itself.
Digital image environments often present themselves as smooth, high-resolution surfaces that seemingly offer no insight into their own underlying structures. Their materiality remains concealed. It is only in moments of disruption — for instance, when a screen is damaged — that the underlying pixel structure becomes visible again.
My drawings take up these hidden structures and seek to make visible the visual noise of the screens that surround us. Through drawing techniques, I translate digital image surfaces into analogue forms, exploring their textures, rhythms, and densities. I am particularly interested in the kinds of visuality that can emerge beyond narrative content.
By directing attention towards structures, grids, and disruptions, I shift the focus away from the surface as a carrier of content and towards the surface itself. My works ask what these mediated image worlds can tell us when we begin to take their seemingly incidental structures seriously.
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About the Project
During my residency in Greece, I intend to develop a series of drawings that explores the visual perception of the town of Koroni. The project will begin with a photographic and film-based exploration of the town, focusing in particular on the interplay of light and shadow in public spaces. Alongside daytime recordings, I also plan to explore nocturnal settings: empty squares, streets, and transitional spaces in which light sources, darkness, and urban structures overlap. These places often resemble stages without actors or action, where atmosphere and visual structure take precedence over narrative events.
In a second step, I will digitally manipulate the photographs and film stills by enlarging, zooming in on, and pixelating selected image details. In a third step, I will translate these transformed images into drawings. By transferring them into an analogue medium, I introduce a further layer of abstraction, through which the original environment increasingly transforms into a media surface.
The resulting series of drawings will investigate how a real place changes through different processes of media transformation, and what new visual spaces can emerge between photography, digital manipulation, and drawing. This process reveals how the enlargement and fragmentation of images can bring certain details of a place to the foreground. Atmospheric qualities in particular — such as lighting conditions and spatial details — can be intensified in this way. The place is no longer presented as a mere representation of itself, but emerges through a shifted perception that makes it visible in a new light.