Angels, Ghosts, & Twins

Angels, Ghosts, & Twins stems from an ongoing collaboration between the artist and artificial intelligence. To start his process, Stamer collaborates with Dall-E 2, an AI image generator, where he writes memories from his childhood as a prompt, and then lets AI create its own visual rendering from the story. He then uses the rendering as his subject–depicting it in oil paint and titling the work after the exact prompt.

Stamer both embraces the technology and approaches it with trepidation. By nature of AI, the software sometimes hallucinates, inputting random figures that add depth and ambiguity to remembered moments. While grounded in contemporary issues, Stamer’s body of work echoes spirit photography from the post–Civil War era. Spirit photographers would often utilize double exposure to create hallucinations or “ghosts” of loved ones who had passed. Created during a time of significant social upheaval at the dawn of photography as a medium, Stamer stands at a modern crossroads—employing technology to explore social unrest and to probe questions about the future.

The paintings in Angels, Ghosts, & Twins show Stamer’s focus on creating depth of space. He not only paints AI’s hallucinations, but also the intuitive mark-making Stamer is widely known for. The resulting compositions feel both fragmented and fully realized–offering a glimpse into an uncanny memory that is no longer entirely his own. Often set within intimate interior spaces, the paintings assert Stamer’s mastery of oil, positioning his compositions alongside Old Masters such as Vermeer, Degas, and Velázquez, while his abstraction echoes modernists like Willem de Kooning and contemporaries such as Cecily Brown.

In Angels, Ghosts, & Twins, Stamer applies his painter's intuition to confront dramatic technological changes with optimism. The result is compositions of shared memory: Stamer’s own mixed with AI’s input. While carefully constructed, the paintings reveal memory’s layered complexity and illustrate how individual experience can be shaped by technological advances.