How does an artist advance a medium that’s been around for millennia? In her Mott Haven studio in the Bronx, artist Avery Singer perfects a personally developed technique that mixes traditional methods with digital processes and pushes her paintings into new terrain.

“You can take traditional tools and employ them in the way that they’ve been intended to be employed for five hundred years, and then in the next hour incorporate some kind of new technology,” says the artist. “The juxtaposition of all these things produces meaning.”

On top of conventional gesso-primed canvases, Singer uses masking tape and an airbrush to realize designs she’s intricately constructed using the 3D modeling program SketchUp. The resulting black and white paintings feature androgynous robot-like figures caught up in opaque narratives inspired by art world tropes: a studio visit, a projectionist’s booth, a slide lecture. Her bravura mixture of styles and techniques seem to reference painting’s entire modern history, from surrealism to Cubism to Russian constructivists like Naum Gobo. Singer hopes the works point to painting’s still unexplored potential by looking both back to the past and forward, to the multiple possibilities of the future.