Once upon a time, I was a ghost. A good friend in art school was studying spirit photography and making his own versions of the popular 19th-century images. I acted goofy and played with cheesecloth in front of the camera, waving my arms like a Scooby-Doo villain. Yet somehow, with the right techniques and technology, the resulting images were the kind of dark, spectral scenes that would’ve easily convinced viewers of 150 years ago that I was a visitor from the Beyond.
In “Angels & Ghosts,” a solo show curated by Dexter Wimberly at the Middlebury College Museum of Art, Damian Stamer’s paintings echo the spirit of spirit photography. The format is entirely different. Stamer’s mostly 6-foot-square oil paintings incorporate searingly bright colors and arrest the viewer with their bold presence. For contrast, the exhibition features a vitrine of spiritualist items lent by Middlebury’s Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History: sober printed pamphlets and small black-and-white photographs of ghostly floating heads, recognizable to a modern audience as double exposures.
What connects the paintings and photographs are the similar cultural moments of their creation, including their relationships to new technology. In the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War had left many people grieving. Photography, not well understood by the average person, offered a potential connection to the dead. Some spirit photographers were scammers, but others likely saw darkroom accidents as messages from another plane.
Today, amid both the weight of human losses and the cultural aftershocks of the pandemic, stories abound of generative artificial intelligence provoking anxiety, hope, fear or even love in its users. Many are apprehensive about AI but certain that, like photography, it will change the world.
In his recent artist talk at the museum, Stamer, now 43, said that in 2022 he was at home in Durham, N.C., rocking his daughter to sleep and scrolling on his phone, when he encountered his first article about DALL•E 2. The AI system generates convincing images from a text prompt.
“I knew immediately that I had to engage with it,” he said.
When he was a kid, Stamer said, he and his twin brother and their friends often explored abandoned rural houses. His memories of those places became a source of inspiration for his paintings, which meld gestural brushstrokes and abstract elements with realistic interiors. Having previously worked from reference photographs, now Stamer started describing his memories to the AI and incorporating elements from the images it produced. Every so often, maybe one in a hundred generations, DALL•E added something — or someone — to the scene.
Stamer describes these apparitions as ghosts and angels: unexpected hallucinatory elements that imbue the interiors with a creepy or supernatural quality. As in spirit photographs, the interlopers range from obvious figures to a subtle blur in the light coming through a window. In some, such as “Collaboration 35 (Angel 1)…” and “Collaboration 36 (Angel 2)…,” the image of a person is part of an object such as a draped sheet; in others, it’s a sparsely described form in shadow. Elsewhere, the figures are more solid. In “Collaboration 39 (Ghost 1 — Scary Ghost)…,” for instance, a faceless girl stands unsettlingly by a wall as if she’s about to crawl right out of the canvas at you, à la The Ring.
The artist reinforces the disquieting vibes of his interiors by titling each work with a short descriptor of the painting followed by the full AI text prompt. One example: “Collaboration 58 (Angel 4): My photographic childhood memory exploring the bedroom of an abandoned rural North Carolina house filled with old junk. Hoarder, floor to ceiling. Mildewed sheets, stained sheets, old cans, subtle tonal shifts. Old painting hanging on the wall. Vermeer, soft yet dramatic lighting.” The prompts use similar but not identical wording to describe each scene; the repetition builds and accumulates until it seems insistent, like an intrusive thought.
They’re a poetic search for things that look and maybe taste like, in the back of my mind, a memory.
Damian Stamer
Stamer said the paintings aren’t all based on the same place; rather, “they’re a poetic search for things that look and maybe taste like, in the back of my mind, a memory.” He noted that his wife suggested one reason he feels so engaged with AI is that it acts as a stand-in for his identical twin brother, Dylan. “It’s always there to collaborate with you and talk with you,” the artist said — much as his brother was when they were kids. The conversational dynamic that comes through in the paintings is part of what makes them compelling.
True to the concept of “Collaborations,” two aesthetic voices speak in these works. One stems from Stamer’s love of painters such as Johannes Vermeer and Titian; in his talk, he said one passage of wallpaper wouldn’t have been possible without a book on Pierre-Auguste Renoir that he adored. He uses this style to offer views of old wooden furniture, paintings askew on the wall and the soft glow of filtered light.
In “Collaboration 58 (Angel 4)…,” he creates an exquisitely articulated space with just a few broad, confident strokes of creamy white to indicate sunlight through a curtained window, balanced against a shadowy desk. Though the AI may have inspired the imagery of the interiors, Stamer’s painting technique elevates and distinguishes it.
Contrast this with the other voice in the mix, this one inspired by painters such as Robert Rauschenberg: loud, bright gestural strokes that give the artist’s physicality a blatant presence on the canvas. In works such as “Collaboration 35 (Angel 1)…,” emphatic lime-green marks made with oil stick read as though someone has crayoned across an old photograph, practically screaming from outside the frame.
Stamer’s two styles play harmoniously together when it seems like they shouldn’t. Sepia scenes descend into orange and blue scribbles; illusionistic space gives way to blank canvas and single brushstrokes. Though the AI tries to offer us the comfort of predictable images, Stamer finds the unexpected in them and runs away with it. Whether there are ghosts in the machine or not, the artist’s very human presence haunts these paintings. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Ghosts and the Machine | Damian Stamer’s AI-inspired paintings haunt Middlebury”
This article appears in The Media Issue • 2026.
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