Opening next Thursday in New York is a show titled Notes on a New Nature where I’ll be exhibiting Netscapes (image above) for the first time. This all happened very quickly about a week after the work was completed and if I had set out to target an exhibition or festival with Netscapes I couldn’t have matched the work more appropriately than Nicholas, the curator, did.
The exhibition is not a new media exhibition per se, it’s a post-new media exhibition – new media is no longer a defining characteristic but artists and works are informed by it. The exhibition bridges the transition from analogue to digital media and uses a very traditional subject, the landscape, to understand how the digital changes/reconfigures that subject. All the artists works participating in the show do this in different ways, for my part it is how a network (collapsing time and space) has a knock on effect on what a landscape can be, how networks allow us to see other places in combination from a distance.
Above: Depth Mapping (The Mountain) by Kate Steciw
The exhibition forms part of the ongoing research of the curator Nicholas O’Brien. It:
critically examines and compares the relationships that contemporary artists working with digital media have to practices started in Modernist Painting – specifically the pursuit of capturing the virtual qualities of what constitutes a landscape. How does an artist depict a space faithfully enough to show its affect on a subject? Can art capture the space between the viewer and the horizon, and where does that horizon reside now that we can digitally circumnavigate the globe? Can the digital reconcile the physical?
One way that we know how to understand the natural is through the domestic spaces of our daily lives. The interior shelter allows for reflection on what is “outside,” and as a result positions civilization away from the natural. However, as various digital and virtual landscape permeate the domestic space, our notion of what constitutes the natural has become more complicated than a simple inside/outside dichotomy. We use all forms of digital and analog technologies to simulate the natural world daily, and artists in this show point to how these tools affect the ways in which the “realness” of the natural is no longer as simple as locating it outside your window.
This newfound complication highlights the central argument of Notes on a New Nature: our varied notion of what constitutes the natural is shaped by technology, which is a narrative that can be traced all the way back to the advent of agriculture and the dawn of civilization. Through employment of various digital approaches, artists in this exhibition reference this long-standing problem we face when attempting to represent landscape and acknowledge the ways in which digital technology has forever changed our understanding of nature.
Above: Antlers Wifi by Rick Silva
Participating artists include: Duncan Alexander, Mark Beasley, Chris Collins, Petra Cortright, Theo Darst, Marjolijn Dijkman, Paul Flannery, Joe Hamilton (aka Hypergeography), Jan Robert Leegte, Sara Ludy, Garrett Lynch, Michael Ray-Vaughn, Sherwin Rivera Tibayan, Nicolas Sassoon, Rick Silva, Pascual Sisto, Kate Steciw, Wes W Wilson, and Krist Wood.
319 Scholes Brooklyn, NY
November 10 – November 20, 2011
Opening: November 10, 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Gallery hours: Friday and Saturday, 2:00pm – 6:00pm and by appointment
Above: Hypergeography by Joe Hamilton
Above: Strange Situation by Chris Collins
