Calvin Brett presents 800

Opening Reception: Thursday August 13, 6-8pm
Exhibition Dates: August 13 – August 15

Multimedia exhibition uses repetition, sculpture, video projection, augmented reality and installation to transform one of the world’s largest humanitarian challenges into a spacial experience while raising funds to help end extreme global poverty.

North Carolina interdisciplinary artist Calvin Brett presents 800, a multimedia art exhibition that uses the number 800 to symbolically represent the approximately 800 million people currently living in extreme poverty worldwide. Through installation, video, augmented reality and wall art using repeated visual forms, the exhibition seeks to make an incomprehensibly large number tangible, creating a reason to contribute to The Borgen Project’s non profit efforts to end extreme global poverty.

The exhibition asks a simple but ambitious question: How can the number 800 be transformed into multiple physical experiences that symbolically communicate the scale of extreme global poverty?

Rather than illustrating poverty through documentary photography alone, 800 uses agglomerations of 800 to symbolically communicate the scale of extreme poverty. Each artwork approaches the number 800 from a different perspective, inviting visitors to contemplate the scale of the statistics and the possibility of a future in which extreme poverty no longer exists. 100 Years ago extreme poverty was 60% of the global population, today it’s 10%. This shows that through awareness and action we could end global extreme poverty as we know it, creating a world where everyone could live into their inherent human potential.

The work in this exhibit will be exploring different ways of representing these statistics through agglomerations of 800 made across various mediums.

“Statistics can inform us, but they rarely allow us to feel the scale of what they represent,” says Brett. “My goal is to create an experience where visitors encounter the number 800 not as an abstraction, but as something that occupies space, demands attention, and invites contemplation. At the same time, I want the exhibition to help alleviate the issue by supporting organizations working to end extreme poverty.”

Developed alongside Brett’s work with The Borgen Project, 800 reflects a belief that contemporary art can serve as both cultural expression and public engagement. While the exhibition raises funds in support of ending extreme global poverty, it is conceived first as an artistic exploration of representation, repetition, and the challenge of visualizing an immense scale.

Known for transforming found and recycled materials into immersive installations, Brett’s practice explores how repetition, labor, and everyday materials can communicate complex environmental and social ideas. In 800, cardboard, moving image, and serial forms become a language for considering both the enormity of global poverty and the collective effort required to reduce it. Brett is interested in repetition with slight alteration, as an essential quality of the universe. From leaves on a tree, to humanity as a whole, to atoms, to vibration (repetitive action), through creating systems for intuitive repetition, Brett aims to create experiences that are novel and awesome yet are familiar by being representational of nature through its repetitive essence.