Location: Home Decor Showroom, 1978

MFA Submission, 2025

Reproduced Showroom Negative #7, 1978, 2024.
Pigment on Inkjet

As a speculative enquiry into the multiplicitous nature of memory—particularly in relation to the recollection and reproduction of past forms—I assembled a dataset of Dutch still life paintings and uploaded it into a machine learning application designed to generate individually unique variants based on that dataset. These AI-generated images then served as the starting point for a series reflecting upon a former showroom, whose evidence now survives only as fragmented memories.

At first glance, these images might appear convincingly authentic, recalling the textures and visual tropes of a showroom’s photographic archive. However, on closer examination, their unstable provenance becomes evident. Subtle distortions, uncanny details, and moments of digital overreach reveal their imposture, gesturing toward a constructed rather than recovered origin.

This tension invites viewers to question the very existence of Studio Reproductions and its supposed negatives. In doing so, the work highlights how memory itself is vulnerable to reconstruction, subject to the same processes of selection, omission, and invention that shape any archive. Just as the showroom becomes an afterimage—half-remembered, half-imagined—these AI-generated still lifes stand in for a broader meditation on authenticity, loss, and the impossibility of fully retrieving the past.

Through this practice, I hope to prompt reflection on what it means to “remember” through mediated images, especially in an era where machine learning can fabricate convincing, yet fundamentally inauthentic, stand-ins for history. Studio Reproductions thus operates as both a speculative fiction and a critical framework, unsettling our trust in photographic and pictorial evidence while opening a conversation about the malleable nature of memory itself.

Reproduced Showroom Negative #7, 1978, detail, 2024.
Pigment on Inkjet

Reproduced Showroom Negative #2, 1978, 2024.
Pigment on Inkjet

Reproduced Showroom Negative #2, 1978, detail 2024.
Pigment on Inkjet

Reproduced Showroom Negative #5, 1978, 2024.
Pigment on Inkjet

Reproduced Showroom Negative #5, 1978, detail 2024.
Pigment on Inkjet

Lizzie Parker

Selected Work