I was recently invited to participate in an upcoming exhibition featuring myself and two other artists, Laura Rautjoki and Phillip Toledano, who have been exploring AI generations that imitate photography, as part of the 2025 Denver Month of Photography at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center this March. The show’s title is History Reimagined, and it was curated by CPAC’s director, Samantha Johnston.
I am very honored and humbled to be included in this amazing exhibition opportunity with two other talented artists exploring AI. Any of you who know me are well aware the majority of my time and energy go to my teaching job and economic survival, so promoting my art always comes in a distant third out of necessity, getting an opportunity of this magnitude is a big win for my artistic career, and it happened organically. I am also happy that the exploration I am doing into AI will have a larger audience, the discussion about AI and truth is essential as we navigate a future filled with media that will imitate reality convincingly and continue to blur the lines between fact and fiction.
Below is a brief excerpt from the curatorial statement:
Photography has long been considered a tool for documenting and understanding the world around us. But as these artists show, the rise of AI forces us to reconsider the very nature of truth in image-making. History Reimagined invites us to examine the complex relationship between image-making, bias, and historical memory, and to ask ourselves: How do we define truth in a world where the lines between real and fabricated are increasingly hard to discern? – Samantha Johnston
I will be showing work from the series Typical American, an ongoing exploration into the bias in image generators using the prompt ‘photograph of a typical American’ thousands of times over the past two years. The prompt continues to return results that depict America from a very specific viewpoint – generally older, white, male, and seemingly conservative. These results are a direct reflection of the predominant culture represented on the internet through media and advertising, also, older, whiter, and more conservative. As part of the exhibition, the artists will be participating in a round table discussion where we will have an opportunity to give context to our work and answer questions from the audience.
If you are within driving distance from Denver I hope to see you at the opening and discussion if you can work it into your schedules, details are available in the provided links in this blog post.
Conceptual Art by Todd Dobbs 