In Practice: Exploring NFT Minting
By Katrienne Lemye
Lemye, an art practice student at Saint Mary’s College of California, created Reimagining ourselves in an ever changing world as an original digital artwork commissioned for the Fall 2022 exhibition Fake It Till You Make It: A Quest for Authenticity.
Through the creation process, Lemye recorded the process of making the digital work and then proceeded to mint the jpeg as Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs). Established around 2014, an NFT is a digital asset that can be bought and sold online in the form of art, music, in-game items, and videos. Purchasing involves cryptocurrency, and the work is encoded with unique identifying blockchain codes that generate scarcity through limited distribution. Below Lemye shares this experience and her thoughts on NFTs.
Lemye’s work is on view through December 11, 2022, at the Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art (SMCMoA).
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Are NFT’s art?
The short answer no… at least for now.
Reimagining ourselves in an ever changing world is a beautiful digital piece that I have worked hard on, and I would consider it a piece of art. However, throughout the process of minting and listing it on the NFT market, I felt the value of my artwork diminishing.
There are better ways to support artists, such as following them on social media, giving them paid exposure, and buying their items through their website. While the NFT marketplace is a possible way for artists to sell their art, the marketplace is over-saturated with… well junk. It is currently not being taken seriously, leading to the personal and actual value of artworks diminishing.
What I’ve gathered from my participation in this project is that the NFT marketplace is not taken seriously because large amounts of contributors market “series of art” for sale that are simply stock photos or poorly sketched animals. I even saw pieces of just words written in sharpie selling for hundreds of dollars. My point is there is a lack of effort within the NFT marketing community. It’s clear the only use for a large part of its audience is for capitalistic and monetization purposes, not art.
It is up to audiences to choose what artists to support. The NFT market is extremely new, which means there is a lot of potential to positively change who and how the market is geared. By supporting the right artists, the NFT marketplace can be an innovative platform for efforted artworks to be valued.
Artist Statement
Katrienne Lemye (b. 2001, Berkeley, CA, United States) is an artist who works in digital media. By merging several seemingly incompatible worlds into a new universe, Lemye tries to increase the dynamic between self and world by objectifying emotions and investigating the duality that develops through different interpretations.
Her artwork, Reimagining ourselves in an ever changing world (2022), bears strong references to the collective quarantine experience. The possibility or the dream of the annulment of a (historically or socially) fixed identity is a constant focal point. By examining the ambiguity and origination via retakes and variations, she seduces the viewer into a world of ongoing pandemonium and the individual that articulates the stream of daily events. Moments are depicted that only exist to punctuate the human drama to clarify our existence and find poetic meaning in everyday life.
Her works never show the complete structure. This results in the fact that the artist and audiences can easily imagine their own interpretations without being hindered by the historical reality. By emphasizing aesthetics, she uses a visual vocabulary that addresses the escapism one feels when being isolated for too long- human connection is needed. The work incorporates time as well as space — a fictional and experiential universe that only emerges bit by bit.
Her works sometimes radiate a spiritual discovery. At times, disconcerting beauty emerges. The inherent visual seductiveness, along with the conciseness of the exhibitions, further complicates the reception of their manifold layers of meaning. Katrienne Lemye currently lives and works in Walnut Creek, CA.
Reimagining ourselves in an ever changing world is now on sale as an NFT on solsea.io.
