Exhibition: It Doesn’t Exist (In Any Other Form)
Exhibition on view:
Nov 9, 2023–Jan 12, 2024
10:00am – 6:00pm
Tuesday through Saturday
Artist:
Casey Reas
Location:
bitforms gallery
131 Allen St
New York, NY
It Doesn’t Exist (In Any Other Form) Casey Reas at bitforms gallery, New York City.
It Doesn’t Exist (In Any Other Form) is Casey Reas’ solo exhibition in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, NYC. Commissioned by the on-chain art ecosystem, Gemma, Bitforms Gallery features the prominent artist’s works for a seventh exhibition. Digital art lovers are invited to view a stunning collection of generative art, blockchain-based works, video, plotter drawings, and woodblock prints.
The title of the show refers to digital native art — a digital painting is born digitally and “it doesn’t exist in any other form.” Reas’ works are also born digitally as real-time performances of coded instruction. They “gesture towards traditional memento mori yet thrive in a state of unrest and evolving motion,” the gallery notes.
It Doesn’t Exist (In Any Other Form) Casey Reas at bitforms gallery, New York City.
In recent years, generative art has surged in popularity, captivating a diverse audience across various creative disciplines. Thanks to advancements in technology, particularly the rise of sophisticated algorithms and machine learning, artists are increasingly drawn to the idea of collaborating with code to produce unique, dynamic, and often mesmerizing visual experiences.
Casey Reas is often referred to as “the godfather of generative art,” as he has long incorporated computational procedures in his practice. The artist co-founded Processing in 2001 and Feral File in 2020, and has gained recognition with his ability to seamlessly blend human creativity with computational processes, celebrating the symbiotic relationship between the artist and the machine.
His innovative approach to artistic expression not only challenges traditional notions of authorship but also opens up new possibilities for exploration and experimentation. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, Casey Reas’ generative artworks serves as a testament to the ever-expanding boundaries of creativity and the harmonious integration of technology into the artistic realm.
It Doesn’t Exist (In Any Other Form) Casey Reas at bitforms gallery, New York City.
The artist explores the topography of geometric line work across different planes of vertical and horizontal spaces — shapes exist, collide, and morph into ever-evolving loops while also being able to exist as static compositions. It’s a mesmerizing visual play of colorful orbits, detailed choreographies, and motion.
“At once familiar yet unpredictable, the artist’s panorama of generative systems do shift across mediums.”
Casey Reas creates systems that performs the work — he generates conceptual software paintings through simulation and computer graphics, synthesize still life images based on ideas for shapes that don’t exist, and imagines in the space between the subjective experience of being in the world versus the objective, analytical way the world is measured, divided, and defined.
It Doesn’t Exist (In Any Other Form) Casey Reas at bitforms gallery, New York City.
Along with the exhibition, the gallery has organized a book signing event with Casey Reas and Allison Parrish — Compressed Cinema features the complete works from Reas’ acclaimed Untitled Film Stills, and is accompanied by a companion text generated in response to the images by Allison Parrish.
“Each Untitled Film Still image is a frame from an imagined film. The idea is to reveal another reality within the original film, something that has the character of the original work, but is transformed into something else. A film is a perspective from which to view the world, and a set of Untitled Film Still images are a unique view of the original film that produces a new and alternate reality in an unexpected way.”
Following the book signing, the group went on to attend a screening of Casey Reas and Jan St. Werner’s Compressed Cinema in a theater rental at Anthology Film Archives. The visitors had the chance to meet and network during the reception that was hosted between two screenings.
It Doesn’t Exist (In Any Other Form) Casey Reas at bitforms gallery, New York City.
Casey Reas is an artist, professor at UCLA, co-founder of Processing and the Processing Foundation and Feral File. Casey Reas’ software, prints, and installations have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries all around the world. Reas’ work is in a range of private and public collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and was named to the ArtReview Power 100 in 2022.
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, In The Screen I Am Everything by Ellie Pritts, and Delusions of a Time-Traveling Cactus by Alexander Reben.
Also featured in Best Galleries to See Digital Art in NYC 2023
The exhibition is open to public at Bitforms Gallery in New York City — visit through January 12th and let us know your thoughts!
It Doesn’t Exist (In Any Other Form) Casey Reas at bitforms gallery, New York City.
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