A couple weeks ago, we were able to sit down with artist, Winston Chmielinski, otherwise known as Weseeclearly or Wes for short. I opened our video chat to find Wes—who is normally based out of Berlin—sitting fireside in a home in the countryside of Japan. It felt aligned looking back at how our conversation was about to unfold. Originally set to be just a 30 minute chat, our tangents took us new places, leading us all over. A conversation spanned his practice in painting, computer vision experiments, newly trained custom AI model, and how they’re all a meditation on what it means to see clearly, imperfectly, or perhaps sometimes not at all.
Reading about Wes, you’ll quickly find both a decade of critically acclaimed solo presentations and this idea of the “Magic Mirror”. Wes puts forth the idea that art is not meant to present as an illusion, but as an unavoidable mirror of the maker.
If you're creating something, you can really hide anything about yourself... it's still saying everything about you.
The work always contains the hand that made it and you see this through his imagery and even naming conventions. His artist name “We See Clearly” and his initials (W.S.C.) reveals a sense of play between presenting the surface and asking to explore the the second layer of things…
I really do want to be someone who is almost clairvoyant, in the sense of seeing beyond what's presented, but not forgetting that also, there's so much truth on the surface, like finding the connection between the surface and the depths all the time.
All it takes is 5 minutes with his work to know, but Wes’ paintings come emotionally charged, capturing personal themes like depression and isolation through abstracted visuals.
Yes, you’ll find scenes or figures in many of his works. But they’re not about a plot, they convey a sense of emotional fullness and equilbirum. His paintings may convey one idea, but often it feels coupled with a counterbalancing feeling.
I was never trying to tell a story in a painting. Within every painting, I tried to achieve a sense of suspension and balance.
Much of this seems to come from the early parts of his process. He mentions that much of building up to paint was about overwheliming himself with visual inputs and then painting toward the center point of whatever aggregate feeling came from that.
This same process carries into the creation of his own custom AI model on TITLES. Trained on his pre-2020 era paintings, his model is an aggregation or center point of a visceral, unresolved quality. Digging in deeper when asking about Wes about his relationship to his own model, I found his response to be opposite of much of the public discourse around AI…
Because AI can now do the thing that I actually really got stressed out about... I’m actually free to own the liminal space and not create anything.
While this was his first reaction in talking about his model, Wes also sees it yet again as a tool for self discovery and affirmation through pattern detection of sorts.
I felt like there was something in those paintings that could be picked up by a model. I’m really interested in seeing my own patterns. I have a very strong sense of what they were and that's why my paintings today look so different, because I actually tried to kind of train them out of myself.
Create with ‘Winston Chmielinski’ on TITLES, here.
Wes has been about using emergent technologies as a way to manufacture that feelings of discomfort out of his daily life. From projects like a press release generator for contemporary art venues, to his most recent project SelfOS, each of them are created and shared in the pursuit of helping himself and others explore their rough edges.
Wes’ SelfOS project—an experimental, poetic tool that interfaces with your writing to reveal deeper patterns—is built on years of thinking about how technology mimics and distorts human thought.
Humans fundamentally... are patterned creatures, but we crave something surprising. In a world of predictive text and autocomplete aesthetics, he seeks the unexpected.
He prefers glitchy, off-center AI models to those that feel overly correct. Their imperfections made them feel alive, unfinished, and emotionally raw. That’s the energy he wants SelfOS to hold. An invitation rather than a command.
Wes practice is deeply rooted in reflection. From his past works painting, SelfOS, and his upcoming project “Interfacing” (keep an eye out for this on the timeline), you’ll find a small window into his explorations exploring identity. We’re so proud to be working with Wes on his new model on TITLES and more excited to see what each of you come up with in his perspective. Please follow Wes on Instagram, Twitter, and try out his model on TITLES, here.
Much love,
— TITLES
TITLES
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