Vickie Vainionpää (b. 1992, Toronto) lives and works in Montréal, Canada. Her work integrates generative and wearable technologies — including algorithms, eye-tracking, and virtual reality — with the material intelligence of painting. Operating between digital and physical environments, her practice reflects the conditions of contemporary perception, in which experience is increasingly mediated by screens, software, and virtual space.
In addition to Cherub VIII at Gainesboro Modern, her work is held in the collections of X Museum, Beijing; The Margulies Warehouse, Miami; and Palazzo Monti, Italy. Her practice has been the subject of critical writing in the Journal of Contemporary Painting and The Globe and Mail, among others.
Gainesboro Modern is pleased to present Vainionpää’s debut institutional solo exhibition.
Dig deeper into Soft Logic here.
The exhibition opens with works from her Soft Body Dynamics series, in which custom generative algorithms produce the twisting, tubular forms that are central to her visual language. Suggestive of both organic matter and digital simulation, these forms foreground the relationship between the body and technology.
Her Gaze Paintings extend this inquiry through a focus on perception. Using a wearable eye-tracking device, Vainionpää records her visual pathways while studying historical paintings by artists including Tintoretto and Bouguereau. She then transforms these recordings into abstract compositions, shifting attention towards the act of looking itself.
The exhibition also features a new painting from the artist’s current Tempest series. Developed using virtual reality tools and more gestural in approach, these works point to an ongoing expansion of the artist’s process and her engagement with emerging technologies.
Across these bodies of work, Soft Logic explores the interplay between digital systems and the physical, handmade surface. The resulting paintings feel at once controlled and intuitive—images that appear computational, yet remain firmly grounded in the artist’s hand.