Masterminds Finalist Brendan Lott

This Thursday SF Weekly will be hosting Artopia, an art show at Project One featuring the 10 finalists in our annual Masterminds contest. That night, we'll award $2,500 grants to three lucky artists. In the meantime, we'll be previewing the works of the works of the finalists here on All Shook Down. First in line -- Brendan Lott.

While many people think of art as a personal expression unique to its maker, Brendan Lott does not - in fact, he outsources his work.

Lott trawls photo-sharing Web sites for his source material: ordinary snapshots of people he's never met, many of whom are posed in sexually suggestive ways (a woman showing off her thong, a postcoital threesome). Once he finds photos he likes, he sends them to China, where he pays artists to paint them photorealistically. "These works began as an attempt to bring my practice in line with my life as a person living in 21st-century America -- wholly mediated, isolated, digital and decentralized and devoid of manual labor or craft," Lott says in his artist's statement. "I have no direct input into the development or manufacture of any product I consume. I think this is wonderful." We do, too, although we suspect some art purists won't.

Lott's work challenges Western notions of artistic authorship. It kinda reminds us Sherrie Levine, who famously re-photographed Depression-era pictures by Walker Evans and made them her own.