Exhibition Review: In The Screen I Am Everything
Exhibition on view:
29 June – 5 August, 2023
11:00am – 6:00pm
Tuesday through Sunday
By:
Ellie Pritts
Location:
bitforms gallery
131 Allen St
New York, NY
In The Screen I Am Everything by Ellie Pritts is at bitforms gallery NYC
Watch our reel from the show!
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Watch our reel from the show! 〰️
Bitforms Gallery of the Lower East Side of Manhattan is radiant than ever with Ellie Pritts’ solo show In The Screen I Am Everything presenting a colorful world of possibilities within AI-collaborative imagery and the art of self-portraiture. The artist presents a collection of works that combine analog video with glitch aesthetics to explore her interior world, and we are here for the ride.
Watch the Digital Art Explained episode on In The Screen I Am Everything
Ellie Pritts is a transmedia artist and curator from Chicago and is currently based in Los Angeles. She works with photography, video, and 2D animation and is widely recognized in the world of Web3 and AI art. Her exhibitions have been presented by companies like Open.AI, SuperRare, Coinbase and featured in publications such as Fortune, TIME, WIRED, and Harper's BAZAAR. She has worked with clients like Apple and Levi’s and exhibited art worldwide.
Ellie Pritts is also featured in 10 Digital Artists: LGBTQIA+ digital artists you should know
In The Screen I Am Everything by Ellie Pritts is at bitforms gallery NYC
The artist has experienced reduced mobility in her hands due to a neurological condition, which prevented her from pursuing painting or drawing, and prompted her to find an alternative way to create visual art. That’s how the artist started creating digital self-portraits, incorporating her photography, text prompts from personal journals, and AI. The accessibility of AI tools is crucial to her practice, and Pritts hopes to be an inspiration to other artists to create in new ways.
“How could I achieve my goal when I can no longer physically draw or paint? How could I turn this into an opportunity to challenge myself differently? … I decided to experiment with giving the AI portraits I had taken of myself along with text prompts from my journal. I was caught off guard with emotion when one of my first attempts created an image of me as a queen. She looked so strong, so self-assured. I felt like I had fed the AI part of my soul and it was holding a mirror up for me to see who I really am for the very first time. After feeling weak in so many ways throughout this process, I now felt more determined and able than ever to complete my series.”
Ellie Pritts’s work explores reinterpreted nostalgia — she mixes analog and digital processes and uses multiple forms of generative AI. In this exhibition, she integrates her own video and photos with advancing AI systems to present a series of printed portraits, polychromatic flowers, wallpaper murals, and manipulated video. While she offers insight into her “dazzling world of colorful possibility,” the viewer is immersed in a digital realm of pink, orange, and yellow.
In The Screen I Am Everything by Ellie Pritts is at bitforms gallery NYC
We are welcomed into the gallery with her Glitch Fleur series, which includes a wallpaper mural, prints, and video. Ellie Pritts manipulates the cadence, pattern, and hue of footage of real flowers while moving between virtual and physical space. Drawing inspirations from Pop Art, this colorful glitch exploration is a dynamic demonstration of curiosity towards evolving technology and its possibility to reflect more of the artist’s interior world.
As we take more steps into the gallery, therefore the artist’s realm, a series of self-portraits called Divine Recursions offer further insight. The images are created through a repetitive process of extracting in-process images and returning them back to the AI learning model to bring about an abstract rhythm and style. Pritts reimagines her own self-portraits by accommodating new features within rapidly developing AI technology and using the unpredictability of AI-generated images as a metaphor of her colorful personality.
“But my series still needed a name... and it was some time before it finally came to me; Divine Recursions. I had experienced some profoundly moving, and even spiritually significant, moments working with AI on this series. When I explained my process to people, they tended to go wide-eyed at how many back and forth steps there were between my inputs and outputs. Most of my projects involve a lot of recursion and this was no exception.”
In The Screen I Am Everything by Ellie Pritts is at bitforms gallery NYC
The exhibition gets its name from the video that’s projected on the big wall — In the Screen I am Everything is a celebration of “the screen as a playground without the boundaries of physical reality,” while being a metaphor of Pritts’ art practice. The playful and curious attitude the artist comes into creating art with is being reflected, or literally projected, among a collection of possibilities. The artist has filmed herself in front of a green screen and let AI generate background environments based on her journal entries. These prompts are not only presenting her various states of being, but also imagining further possibilities and potentials.
Surrounding the title piece there are six videos that celebrates the artist’s glitch art. The videos present a colorful layer of analog feedback below mythological dreamlands Pritts escapes into. These are daydreams and mythical universes of the artist, while being “a mystical study on the divine feminine through a lens of mindfulness and androgyny.” Pritts points at the biases of software, stating it cannot understand gender, non-corporeal entities, or empathy, while questioning if she has the expansive mindset to truly grasp them. The series invites the viewer to challenge their own sense of self-understanding in a colorful universe of possibilities.
In The Screen I Am Everything by Ellie Pritts is at bitforms gallery NYC
The exhibition is on view at Bitforms Gallery, which was founded in 2001 to support and advocate for the collection of ephemeral, time-based, and digital artworks. They represent artists that critically engage with new technologies and program exhibitions that present digital and new media art forms, such as Pixelweaver by Daniel Canogar and Code Chronicles curated by Aleksandra Artamonovskaja.
The exhibition is free and open to public at Bitforms Gallery in New York City — visit through August 5th and let us know your thoughts!
In The Screen I Am Everything by Ellie Pritts is at bitforms gallery NYC
