The Most Beautiful Place Is Far From Here (Rocky Mountain Scene, Erasure No. 16), 2018, acrylic on canvas, 62 x 96 inches

Since construction was completed in 1800, the White House has served not only as home to each successive US President, but also as a repository of American history, preserved in portraits and landscapes collected by the White House Historical Association. 

The collection contains iconic works ranging from Gilbert Stewart's famous portrayals of George Washington to Albert Bierstadt's epic scenes of the American frontier. For the contemporary American artist Shawn Huckins, who straddles the divide between traditional figurative painting and bleeding-edge digital culture, the archive is a provocation to consider how the past is treated today and how history might be remembered in the future.

The eighteen paintings in Fool's Gold, Huckins' second solo exhibition at Modernism, mash up past and present by imagining masterpieces in the White House collection to be as ephemeral as Adobe Photoshop files. Meticulously repainting works by Stewart and Bierstadt, as well as Charles Wilson Peale and William Merritt Chase, Huckins 'updates' them by simulating digital erasures: The artist selectively replaces portions with patches of gray-and-white checkerboard identical to the pattern that Photoshop users see when they delete sections of digital photos...

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