Show Off: Digiscapes!
Show Off
July 7 – 29, 2017
This July the Lump interns are curating each side of the gallery and inviting viewers to score their exhibits. Exhibition guides will act as score cards for visitors to use as they think about the exhibitions and the curating styles.
Digiscapes!
Curated by Anthony Hamilton
Anthony Hamilton was born in Kingston, Ontario. He received a BFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently works as an artist in Durham, NC.
Behind the pixelated screen, a current cuts through the landscape: digitization. Discovering new places is both easier and harder due to the complete digitization of the American wilderness. With 1.3 trillion photos taken a year, landscape has taken the role of any exterior space: parking lots, suburban backyards, working quarries; not solely public picturesque vistas. New places are accessible to anyone with at least a broadband connection through Google Maps, Facebook, and Yelp, democratizing experience but eliminating surprise. We view even the most disparate landscapes through an Instagram filter. Are remote landscapes now mundane or waiting for rediscovery? The themes that appear in the artist’s works – metadata, taxonomy, colonization, and banality, among others – reflect how the landscape has shaped cyberspace and how the digisphere is now shaping the landscape. Abstraction, collage, artificially saturated colors, and transplanted landscapes reflect the manmade interruption of technology from shaped hiking trails, GIS-mapped farmland, and visuals of drone strikes. Landscapes are catered to handhelds yet they encourage us to leave technology behind, complicating the transition between nature and cyberspace.
Artists:
