OPENING 5 SEPTEMBER: 17.00 - 19.30HRS

Upstream Gallery is pleased to present Sightings, a new solo exhibition by Jan Robert Leegte. 

About Sightings

JPEG compression was originally invented for photographs. Sightings turns that relationship inside out. Where the JPEG works strip the image away entirely, Sightings uses a similar algorithm to produce images that look photographic without being photographs at all. Using a deterministic generative system, Leegte produces images made entirely by code and compression: no source photograph, no scene in the world, nothing being captured. And yet the results look unmistakably like something glimpsed: the wavering quality of a telephoto lens pushed beyond its range, the shimmer of Hubble deep fields, satellite reconnaissance stills, extreme-zoom footage always slightly too compressed to be conclusive. The works produce an unresolvable tension between abstraction and realism, between the artificial and the documentary.

A sighting is what you call an image of something you cannot quite identify, something seen but not confirmed. Sightings generates that condition from scratch. It is not a photograph of something blurry. It is the blurriness itself, given the shape of a photograph. At a moment when AI-generated images have made the question of what pictures can be trusted newly urgent, Sightings is a reminder that the uncanny relationship between code and image long predates it.

“Generative software I developed produces images living entirely within extreme compression, with no photograph as source. No camera, no scene. And yet they read as captured: a zoomed-in galaxy image, that too-grainy UFO footage from the forums, viewing through a microscope at the edge of resolution. The title names exactly that condition. A sighting is what you call an image of something you cannot definitively identify, something seen, but not confirmed. The photographic feeling is entirely an effect of code and codec. It is not a photograph of something blurry. It is the blurriness itself, given the shape of a photograph.” - Jan Robert Leegte