Virtual Exhibition: CATALYST
Exhibition on view:
June 16 – September 15, 2023
Curated by:
EPOCH Gallery
In collaboration with Honor Fraser Gallery
Location:
Honor Fraser Gallery
And Online
Black Conversation by Auriea Harvey in CATALYST at EPOCH
CATALYST is a group exhibition organized by EPOCH in partnership with Honor Fraser Gallery. The show is presented both physically and virtually, at Honor Fraser Gallery through August 19th and online at EPOCH through September 15th.
The exhibition is a brilliant collection which explores themes around history and archiving — and what’s kept and what’s forgotten in a post apocalyptic world.
The hybrid exhibition s set in a post-apocalyptic LA and takes place in a speculative 3D model of LACMA’s forthcoming building, designed by Peter Zumthor. Visitors at Honor Fraser Gallery can experience the digital environment using VR headsets within the physical installation.
CATALYST is on view at EPOCH Gallery through September 15, 2023
“The interior of the digitally fabricated museum is clean and undisturbed — nearly tomb-like—where viewers can interact with artworks safe from the compounding disasters unfolding outside of the museum’s colossal glass windows. The architectural contours of the forthcoming museum are replicated outside of the headsets, transforming Honor Fraser white walls into undulating partitions of translucent fabric and warm LA light.”
CATALYST is about accelerating change — just like chemicals in a laboratory, the collection is of artwork that provoke personal, social, or political change. The show questions the role of cultural institutions and their responsibilities in relation to giving rise to change. While raising questions related to biases within these spaces, the exhibition itself becomes a space where individual artwork that prompt change are seen and celebrated.
The exhibition features seven internationally renown artists — here’s a little about them and their artwork in the show.
Virtues and Vices by Carla Gannis in CATALYST at EPOCH Gallery
Carla Gannis is a transmedia artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She produces works that consider the uncanny complications between grounded and virtual reality, nature and artifice, science and science fiction in contemporary culture. In this collection she presents Virtues and Vices, video art and virtual sculpture, which focuses on the digital deconstruction of identity. Avatars voiced by artificial intelligence question our digital identities, sense of ourselves, and relationships with others.
Sammie Veeler is an artist based in Los Angeles. Her art practice involves performance, digital media, world building, and prose. She seeks to examine the spiritual and transformative power of personal and collective digital archives by connecting her personal practice of preserving her late husband's personal data to the collective production of history online. Her installation in the show, We Become Our Own Ancestors, recreates and archives her late husband’s room and includes her 3D avatar Miss Sammie, video Come Over Here, and 3D models of stickers and notes called Miss Sammie and Theseus.
We Become Our Own Ancestors by Sammie Veeler in CATALYST at EPOCH Gallery
“Part of this scene is about like forming a visual knot in time between my work now and the art that my dead husband wasn’t calling art; unbeknownst to him the ai poetry he generated at that table would uncover the operative principle in my practice today.”
Bahareh Khoshooee is a multidisciplinary artist born in Tehran, Iran and currently based in NYC. In her work she explores the underlying tension between reality and fiction, confabulation and manipulation, false memories and alternative facts. Her digital sculpture with video texture and audio in this exhibition is called #EverChangingFacade (Virtual Iteration) and examines governmental and capitalist modes of surveillance specifically through the lens of the artist’s lived-experiences.
“Visual content from social media (specifically images pulled from Explore on Instagram which are sensitive to where one lives, who they follow, and what they “like”) are digitally layered with Bahareh Khoshooee’s own self-portraiture, animated, and projected upon the surface of a cloud-shaped form. Blurring the edges of her identity as a femme Iranian immigrant based on the U.S., the piece becomes an ever-shifting digital skin of algorithmic content projected upon the static aggregate of overlapping forms, fighting against the flattening of these assumed or imagined identities.”
Trulee Hall creates work that presents a surreal geography drawing on motifs of the domestic, the decorative, and the erotic. Her creative practice spans video, sculpture, painting, audio composition, and choreographed dance. Her piece in CATALYST, Mermaid Mutations, presents an optimistic and sweet survival scenario — a queer underwater utopia after the flood. Combining the historical myths of a great flood with humanoid sea creatures akin to horny tail-less mermaids, she weaves these archetypes into an optimistic tale of romantic and blissful survival.
Mermaid Mutations by Trulee Hall in CATALYST at EPOCH Gallery
Tanya Aguiñiga is an artist, designer, and craftsperson who was born in San Diego, California, and raised in Tijuana, Mexico. She works with traditional craft materials like natural fibers and collaborates with other artists and activists to create sculptures, installations, performances, and community-based art projects. Her virtual video installation within this exhibition, Mi Nepantla, is the artist’s first venture into the digital realm.
Auriea Harvey is a digital artist and sculptor who is based in Rome, Italy. Her art practice involves virtual and physical sculptures, drawings, and simulations. Within this collection she presents her digital AR sculpture, Black Conversation, which is in the form of a Greek Kantharos (a type of ancient cup used for drinking). The dual faces adorning the vessel are of a mother and her son, and the artwork reflects how a small conversation can yield significant effects. She also exhibits a series of AI generated images called Slave Ship Diagram, which depicts “arguments” between the artist and the algorithm about slave ships.
Slave Ship Diagram series by Auriea Harvey in CATALYST at EPOCH
Caroline Sinders is an artist, machine learning designer, and activist from New Orleans who is currently based in London. She is interested in useful art and Human Rights Centered Design. Her virtual installation in this show, The Rig, is a mixed media piece which takes place in Louisiana in a futuristic world. The artist narrates the story of how she has overtaken an abandoned oil rig to claim it as her home, exploring concepts around grief and home.
The Rig by Caroline Sinders in CATALYST at EPOCH
The entire CATALYST exhibition is offered in an edition of 4 as an interactive HTML on the Ethereum blockchain, and David Garcia recently collected one of them. The entire virtual exhibition containing all the participating artists’ works was acquired as a singular interactive HTML work for 5 ETH.
CATALYST is on view at EPOCH through September 15, 2023 — see the virtual exhibition and let us know your thoughts!
CATALYST is on view at EPOCH Gallery through September 15, 2023
