PELHAM, NY — Pelham Art Center is pleased to present A Rose is a Screen is a Rose from May 11-June 30, 2018. The free opening reception is on Friday, May 11, from 6:30-8:00 pm.
In a world in which nearly all sight is modified and mediated through a screen, how do artists both embrace and push back against this? This group exhibition explores artists’ responses to an ever consuming digital world, one that is reshaping the way we experience and comprehend our natural one.
The artists in this exhibition explore our changing relationship to the natural world via digital and analog technologies and techniques; recycling imagery, painting on images digitally, building physical structures, and augmenting reality. The artists reflect the deeply held pull of the digital – it is a platform, a tool, a foundation for each of these works.
Working off of Gertrude Stein’s line “a rose is a rose is a rose…” the screen becomes a literal and abstracted starting point; it is surface as well as a viewpoint, a frame and a construct, a boundary and an ever expanding platform. The works depict but also embody nature as we tweak and bend it to our will. As we unthinkingly mediate reality through Google images, phone photos and virtual reality technologies, these artists react with cheek and weariness to our current situation.
In A Rose Is a Screen Is a Rose, we encounter a conversation that sees the world for what it is: dazzling, alarming, changing, disappearing, being reborn, and nearly slipping out of our physical lives and purely into the visual.
Curator Magali Duzant is an interdisciplinary artist whose research-based practice investigates the poetics of perception, subjectivity of seeing, and the roles of technology and translation as mediators of lived experience.
About the artists:
Richard Munaba takes our addiction to screens, setting the immersive scene with dirt, plants, and explorable lush jungles making us aware of our real distance to nature.
Sacha Vega morphs a single image into a nostalgic View Finder, a life sized mesh screen and a tangible floor surface – we walk on clouds, see through them, hold them.
Roxana Azar’s lush digital photographs capture the sheer beauty we associate with nature, simultaneously shining a light on the uncanniness hidden in the folds, hinting at encroaching climate change.
Paula Morales questions the origin of the image, investigating the space between analog and digital worlds. The screen is both a key to understanding, and a creeping flattener of our Technicolor 3D world.
