For me the Internet has always been a physical space. Working as a sculptor, the first moment I started experimenting with HTML code and viewed the results in the browser, I witnessed a physical installation.
-Jan Robert Leegte talking to cont3xt.net

Notes on a New Nature is a physical manifestation of an ongoing research project conducted by artist, writer, and curator Nicholas O'Brien. The research 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 effect 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.

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-Von, Sherwin Rivera Tibayan, Nicolas Sassoon, Rick Silva, Pascual Sisto, Kate Steciw, Wes W Wilson, and Krist Wood.

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A Small Forest at Kunsthalle New, Chicago (2011)

co-curated with Bea Fremderman

A Small Forest explores delicate landscapes developed and appropriated by artist that have been found and manipulated within the space of the screen. The scale and focus of these environments varies between each maker, however the underlying self-reflexiveness of each participant is reflected in the tenderness of the spaces that they shape. Manning employs gifs to create delicate animation loops that reflect on a recent past, a distant landscape, and the resulting forgotten emotion that was once occupied but now remains abstract. The lush super-saturated moments found within Padgitt-Coles' digital images linger in an ambient realm that only appears in discarded or neglected VHS b-roll footage from backyard nature documentaries. The abstract nostalgia of Manning and Padgitt-Coles is countered by the physical reconfiguration of Steciw's rug which reminds us our physical presence in the space of the screen. Lastly, van der Zanden's machinima employs a humorous approach to tackling the issue of land and its representation in digital frameworks. Together these artist's create a suite of subtle works that slow the otherwise rapid navigation of the networked world, and give pause to allow for the sublime properties of land to take precedence when entering screen space.

Artists Include: Michael Manning, Camilla Padgitt-Coles, Kate Steciw, Michiel van der Zanden

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Youth Culture at The Future Gallery, Berlin (2011)

co-curatred with Adan De La Garza

The name - and premise - of this exhibition derives it's origins from a conversation between co-curators Adan De La Garza and Nicholas O'Brien during a recent punk show they attended in Denver. Both artists couldn't help but notice that they were both by all ordinary appearances the oldest audience members and realized that they would never be able to interface with the culture of a punk community in the way that the younger population of the crowd seemed to revel in. In the midst of this realization, both artists also realized that within the context of a punk show they might be beyond their prime, but within an art world context they were just coming into their own. The shifting and reconciliation between both contexts informs the platform of this show. The works within Youth Culture attempt to simultaneously interface with the recent past beyond one's reach and the future prospects of critical self-awareness.

Artist Include: Manuel Buerger, Stephanie Davidson, Adan De La Garza, Tobias Fike, Danny Martin, Alexandra Gorczynski, Jason Lazarus, Nicholas O'Brien, Billy Rennekamp

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TEXT

MORE SOON

For now:
A Love Letter to Computers Club
A Case Study on the Influence of Gestural Computing
Bad At Sports
Art:21


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