Lily Rand is a painter based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work investigates our historical moment as it takes place through online communities and digital spaces. Using the painstaking and rigorous techniques of figurative painting, she memorializes these online phenomena, which are often ephemeral and vulnerable to censorship and erasure. Our daily experience consists of a series of shocks, of which an integral part is seemingly disposable images, that emerge and fade from the slipstream of information too quickly to grasp onto. 

Rand seeks to redeem this process of loss and disintegration by resurrecting these degraded (both in content and form) images, Lazarus-like, from the unmarked grave of the digital inferno--a hell that contains dead images, and those that have lost their souls. To do this, she takes Walter Benjamin’s premise of Aura as a starting point. Namely, the soul contained within artworks. Benjamin considered all photography to be soulless, a one way gaze that cannot be returned by the photography. Rand attempts to find the emanation of an Aura in the one place where Benjamin refused to look for it himself, namely the most degraded of images. She thus brings the viewer through the other side of the mirror, as her work rewards their attentive gaze tenfold, unfurling mysteries, sudden shivers of recognition, and the illuminations of a hand-crafted work of art, irreplaceable and Unique. The 20th century witnessed the end of the traditional Aura in art. Through the valley of this shadow, Rand brings the idea of the individual artwork out of its postmodern cul-de-sac kicking and screaming into the present. She paints nothing less than what we assumed was a lacuna, a void, a lack.