MJ: You’re currently undertaking a residency at PICA. Could you tell us about the project you’re developing during your time here and what you hope to explore or achieve over the four weeks? 

TM: The residency has provided a fantastic opportunity for my ongoing Social Realism project, drawing upon 2000s-era low-value digital images from Facebook as a meditation on this nascent era of low digital literacy, compared to today’s hyper self-conscious and curated online world—what we’ve lost in becoming fluent at being watched. The painting I’ve been working on during the residency, Deep Chats.jpg, draws upon a found image that was captured from the point of view of someone in a pool, looking out at a crowded party scene. It’s a dark and chaotic image, with the camera’s ISO cranked, creating digital noise in the shadows and mid tones, and lens flares as an effect of the flash ricocheting off a splash of water in the foreground.  

To replicate the effect of randomised digital noise, I’ll be utilising a chunky loom state linen, with finely chopped pet fur mixed in, both of which contain a lot of textural latitude. It’s a real mess, so the challenge with this painting is replicating the murky colours and digital information in a way that doesn’t compromise the pigment’s luminosity too much. Working with a restricted colour palette, my approach is to combine layered glazes of oil paint and pronounced impasto (thickly applied paint) to build spatial depth, aided by the cavities created from the pet fur and loom state.  

Between the various layers, I will veil the work using a specially designed SFX spray “splatter nozzle” (originally for bloodstain effects in film and TV) to create hundreds of colourful, translucent dots. Riffing on the debunked colour theory of neo-Impressionists, the idea is to simultaneously mask the information below, whilst allowing for optical colour mixing through the subsequent layers of paint. This means that up close the colours are vibrant, but from afar they appear lustreless and dusty.  

MJ: The archive of images you’ve drawn from the early Facebook era recall a  time that many people remember with a mix of nostalgia and embarrassment. What is it about this particular period that interests you and why are you choosing to revisit it in your practice? 

TM: I’m mostly interested in how this finite era of naïve, user-driven image sharing—turbo charged by “tagging” as a new kind of social commutations utility—marks an epoch that went on to forever alter how we represent ourselves online and attribute value to images, particularly images of people. Today, now awash with ubiquitously perfect imagery and high digital literacy as the new norm, millions of these 2000s low-value images remain amassed on Facebook’s servers, forgotten and with no real application, beyond being fed into AI. As a re-contextualisation of figurative painting techniques and materiality, it’s my hope that Social Realism transposes these disposable images to reveal something peculiarly authentic and unretrievable. 

MJ: One of the defining features of that time was the sheer volume of digital images shared online, often without much consideration or curation. With so many images to choose from, what compels you to select a particular photo for reinterpretation? 

TM: The digital images I’ve sought out are from a medley of strangers and friends on Facebook who have had active accounts since the early 2000s. As a minimum, I am legally required to gain permission from the photographer/creator of an image, as it’s sometimes impossible to get in touch with everyone depicted, especially when I don’t know them. I begin by ‘friending’ users, sometimes with mutual contacts, and declaring my project to them up front and seeking their permission. I’m often met with a puzzled response. I suspect people at first think I’m a bot. Though generally, people are intrigued by my bizarre request to paint their long forgotten 2000s digital photographs and I tend to remain in contact with them over the course of painting the work.  

However, in two instances, when I’ve sought permission from the photographer/creator of the image, people who are incidentally depicted in the photo have then seen the painting and gotten upset (even when they are barely recognisable, nearly silhouetted or their likeness is obstructed by shutter speed blur or digital noise). I’m also often working against Meta’s friend recommendation algorithms to find new subjects. Sometimes it feels like I’m prying, scrolling through people’s private yet broadcasted lives.  

The digital photographs I’m hoping to find are unremarkable, mundane and largely forgettable, often taken accidentally, with little to no compositional merit or other redeeming features by traditional photographic standards. I’ve avoided images that are too self-aware, attention-seeking, gimmicky, lewd or with unintended journalistic qualities. But my efforts to avoid overly nostalgic imagery have been nigh impossible, given the inherent time capsule nature of the subject matter. In sync with this low value pursuit, the images must also exemplify the shortfalls of the digital image capturing technologies of this era; consumer point-and shoot-cameras or flip phone cameras plagued by low light noise, low mega pixel, low bit rate, an absence of built in red-eye removal software, all compounded by Facebook’s hefty server compression.  

One image I haven’t yet painted that speaks to all of the above depicts two girls in a public bathroom who have attempted to photograph themselves in the mirror, but the reflected flash has obscured half the image. In other words, my commitment to this project has forced me to paint objectively shitty images that, as a classically trained painter, I’d really rather not paint. Still, I’m drawn to this user’s historic decision to upload this image to their Facebook profile, with no real intent beyond a kind of absentminded fun. If this was done today, it might appear intentionally referential or superficially trendy, which draws attention to how finite this moment of honest personal online representation was and likely not to be repeated. 

MJ: Social media has evolved significantly since the early 2000s. In your view, how does the experience of online identity differ for younger generations today? What do you think has been lost or gained as platforms have become more curated and self-conscious? 

TM: I do believe that these forgotten 2000s images, when transposed into paintings, invite the viewer to ruminate on just how rapidly our online social participation has changed. Their naivety speaks to this brief moment when it looked like social networks might actually deliver on their promise of creating the new “digital town square”, before something far more superficial, narcissistic and insidious began to emerge. I honestly feel the best answer I can give to this question is to quote author Richard King who contributed a short essay towards Social Realism, in which he wrote: 

‘Rendered and retouched in oils, they speak to a time before our lives were sucked into the reputational economy of likes, retweets and followers; a time before the mask of social media began to eat the face beneath. It is no coincidence (though it may be unintended) that nearly all of them show young adults at play…with the promise of joyful sociability. No one in these paintings has an ‘Instagram face’; no one is signalling wealth or virtue. The images are a record of (embodied) conviviality.’

MJ: The original photos you reference were often created quickly and shared instantly, whereas your process of reimagining them through hyper-real painting is meticulous and time-intensive. How do you reflect on the contrast between these two modes of image-making? 

TM: A few years ago, I became aware of my own subconscious tendency to seek out “high value” photographic source images, as if only these “worthy” images could possibly justify the ungodly hours it takes to render the immense detail demanded by photorealism and hyperrealism styles; otherwise, why would you bother? But in response to this metric of labour and its often-homogenised aesthetic, I’ve gradually turned my practice in on itself to interrogate the open-ended question; what constitutes an image worth painting? In sync with this, I began to experiment in blending photorealism with formalist elements from Classical Realism, 17th-century Dutch Golden Age painters, and 18th-century Neo Impressionists. And that is, paradoxically, where I’m currently getting my kicks; the incongruity of applying centuries old painting techniques to render these low value images which only came into existence in the past twenty-five or so years .  

While I am still drawing on my background in photorealism, my methodology has broadened to embrace more painterly styles. I’m not trying to disguise the paint (as photorealistic traditions demand) but use the materiality, the ground, the substrate—be it canvas, loom state linen or aluminium honeycomb panel – to transpose, rather than reproduce these images. In doing so, it is very much my intent that they look specifically like paintings of digital photographs of this 2000s era. Having never worked like this before, or with this subject matter, I find there is a very satisfying inflection point when a really uninteresting or anaemic digital photo resolves into an intriguing or at least curious painting. Sometimes this magic trick happens towards the very end and I spend a month or more on an image that isn’t speaking to me, trusting—or hoping—that the process will get me there. 

MJ: You have an upcoming exhibition at Lawson Flats in the new year. What can audiences expect from this show, and what else is on the horizon for you? 

TM: The upcoming show at Lawson Flats will showcase three to five major pieces from my Social Realism body, including the unveiling of Deep Chats.jpg from the PICA residency, plus a separate in-conversation event during the show’s three-week presentation. The exhibition will adorn the walls of Lawson Flats’ foyer, which is relatively small, so the large works will feel quite maximalist and chaotic in the space. Having shown in Sydney, Melbourne and London, I’m really excited to finally present these works to a home crowd! 

As for next year, among my Social Realism body of work there is a painting of a 2000s Facebook photo from the POV of someone photographing the Venus de Milo in the Louvre, situated among a crowd of fellow tourists also clambering to photograph the historically iconic sculpture. It’s poorly framed and the camera’s shutter speed was too slow, so the photo is blurry. Yet, this impromptu, poorly executed holiday snap was uploaded and broadcast to the world, to evidence the user’s visit to the Louvre and presence before the great Venus de Milo. During which, one could presume neither the camera’s sensor nor the sculpture’s art-historical significance had enough time to fully register. I’m intrigued by this the frenzied compulsion to photograph the sculpture, as if the goddess had ascended from mythology to celebrity status. Of all my Social Realism paintings, this one has lingered in my mind the longest, such that I’ve begun an offshoot project; paintings of terrible photos of great artworks. My focus for next year is to present these new works at national and international art fairs and attend a semester’s study at Kingston Art College in London. 

Images: Tessa MacKay, Quick Response Artist-in-Residence, Studio Program, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2025, courtesy of the artist. Photo: Henry Whitehead