bitforms gallery is pleased to present Out of Body: Sculpture Post-Photography co-curated by Claudia Hart and Susan Silas. This exhibition will feature five women artists who create sculpture using production techniques emerging from simulations technologies. Stephanie Dinkins, Claudia Hart, Carla Gannis, Sophie Kahn and Susan Silas engage issues of sexuality, the body, and identity during the current paradigm shift, in which conceptions of reality and authenticity are called into question as the dominant means of production is moving from photographic capture toward computer simulation.
Opening: Saturday October 27, 6 – 8 PM
Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 11 AM – 6 PM & Sunday 12 – 6 PM
bitforms gallery is pleased to present Out of Body: Sculpture Post-Photography co-curated by Claudia Hart and Susan Silas. This exhibition will feature five women artists who create sculpture using production techniques emerging from simulations technologies. Stephanie Dinkins, Claudia Hart, Carla Gannis, Sophie Kahn and Susan Silas engage issues of sexuality, the body, and identity during the current paradigm shift, in which conceptions of reality and authenticity are called into question as the dominant means of production is moving from photographic capture toward computer simulation.
The works in the exhibition are representations of the female form, destabilized, decayed, crystallized, roboticized, consumerized, or strangely hyper-realized beyond what the eye can see or the camera can index. They represent an evolving consciousness, expressing the possibilities of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, 3D scanning, rapid prototype printing, and augmented reality. Sculpture, photography and video no longer adhere to their past definitions; instead they become new hybrid forms whose plasticity mirrors the fluidity and mutability they seek to represent.
Conversations with Bina48 by Stephanie Dinkins features a series of video interviews the artist conducts with a black humanoid robot said to be capable of independent thought and emotion. The two have discussed family, racism, faith, consciousness, loneliness, knowledge, age, and robot civil rights. Their conversations have been entertaining, frustrating, surprisingly humorous, philosophical, and, at times, absurd.
Claudia Hart’s Alice Unchained is a virtual reality environment designed for the Vive platform, that can be accessed inside a physical room in the gallery, wallpapered and carpeted with decorative patterns. Motions captured from choreographer Kristina Isabelle and professional wrestler Isaias Velazquez have been combined into a single avatar, visible within the virtual reality environment. Hart imagines them as cyborg, a virtual performance beyond gender. A similar hybridity has been integrated into the score, in which drummers follow a digital click-track of computer generated sound.
In Origins of the Universe Carla Gannis references both Gustave Courbet’s provocative nineteenth century painting L’Origine du monde and the contemporary fad of 3D printing sculptural holders for smartphones. Gannis depicts a nude woman lying on a bed, her legs splayed open and wrinkled sheets covering her face and upper torso. A monolith-like iPhone is placed between her thighs.
Machines for Suffering I, is the result of Sophie Kahn’s ongoing investigation into female hysteria, a once-prevalent but now-discredited medical diagnosis. At the Salpêtrière hospital in nineteenth-century Paris, doctors developed charts and photographs that described poses supposedly typical of hysteria. Kahn used these documents to choreograph a group of dancers to reenact the poses for a 3D scanner and then 3D printed the fragmented scans that resulted. The final sculptures incorporate intricate scaffolds which serve to support the fractured bodies, suggesting a woman whose body, or psyche, is subject to a process of construction or demolition.
AGING VENUS, by Susan Silas is a contemporary iteration of Greek classical sculpture using the artist’s aging body as the model. The creation of this sculpture began with a 3D scan of her body, which has served as a reference for a number of photographic and sculptural works. The sculpture in this exhibition was cut from Italian Sivec white marble and finished by hand. The artist worked with Garfagnana Innovazione in Gramolazzo, Italy, using their high performance 3D scanner and a precision anthropomorphic robot.
In this era, exemplified by the #MeToo movement, women seek autonomy and reject the constraints of male-defined femininity and sexual binaries, ideas which have been historically employed to oppress them. As Donna Haraway urged in her canonical Cyborg Manifesto, women should move beyond old binaries and create other identities for themselves. Simulation technology enables an expression of less rigid identities and bodies, an impulse these artists share. Out of Body: Sculpture Post-Photography pushes back against the phallocentric, masculinist attributes produced by the tech industry and engineering culture.
King’s College London: Claudia HartClaudia Hart has always been at the forefront of experimentation with virtual imaging, using 3D animation to make media installations and projections, then later as they were invented, other forms of VR and AR. Hart’s work is about issues of the body, perception, nature collapsing into technology and then back again.
BITFORMS GALLERY EXHIBITED A GROUP SHOW THAT EXEMPLIFIES NEW MEDIA ART A pioneer and champion of new media, digital and internet-based art, New York-based gallery bitforms presented the works of Ellie Pritts, Claudia Hart, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Manfred Mohr, Jonathan Monaghan and Refik Anadol.
http://Web3 Travel Guides: Future Horizons, Art Dubai Digital And BeyondOne of the longest-running and most well respected new media art galleries, bitforms represents established, mid-career, and emerging artists critically engaged with new technologies, offering an incisive perspective on the fields of digital, internet, and time-based art forms.
Sotheby’s Offers Claudia Hart’s MORE LIFE in Sale of “Natively Digital: Ordinals”“This piece, MORE LIFE, was one of the first that I produced after the series of book works that I did in the early nineties. I consider it to be the beginning of my current installation-based 3D animation practice.’’ – CLAUDIA HART
Claudia Hart Breathes Life into Static Tropes of Modernism, HyperallergicClaudia Hart’s new exhibition focuses on the masters of Modernism, Matisse in particular, an artist whose work straddles early 19th-century and Modern art galleries in most museums. Hart’s use of Matisse seems to relish the contradiction at the core of modern and contemporary art today; in a field with so much appropriation, borrowing, and stealing, what does copyright mean anyway?
In Conversation With Claudia Hart, International Journal for Digital Art HistoryClaudia Hart’s work range in media: architecture, painting/illustration, installation, eventually moving on to study animation – leading her to 3D animation art. Theory seems to be both the starting point and the end point of all of her artistic endeavours. Here, Hart, sits down with Tina Sauerlaender to discuss her work, career and how we are experiencing a crisis of truth.
Claudia Hart: The Ruins reviewed in The Brooklyn RailThe front window of bitforms gallery displays Claudia Hart’s The Orange Room (2019), a bold crimson painting featuring energetic twists of lime green that slink down a wall, into and then across a table: the two dimensional wall becomes one with the three-dimensional table so that neither kind of space operates clearly. It’s a painting that allows Hart to introduce rates of time to the dimensional illusions that Matisse created in his 1908 masterpiece, The Dessert: Harmony in Red.
The Tree of Life curated by Claudia Hart reviewed in The Brooklyn RailIn The Tree of Life, the esteemed digital artist Claudia Hart curated a show about how nature engages us amidst “the speed of time, history, archiving, memory, hard drives and resolution” that define our mediated lives. Her musings on how certain objects create moments and the way technology determines certain spans of time are thoughtful and thought-provoking, and they provide a context for the nine artists’ works. The website, designed by Shi Zheng, imitates the graphics of timelines—images and memory being two things at the heart of Hart’s opening essay written during the period of isolation.
Close Readings 1 – Claudia Hart: SwingImages capture us somewhere. Or we write on images that capture us. The ten-minute video work, Claudia Hart’s The Swing (2006), part of the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, captured me within the first few seconds.
The Tree of Life, curated by Claudia Hart, opens online May 15The works on my website timeline originate in the year 1995. Updating the early entries with higher resolution images was always the next thing on my to-do list. When Corona hit, it rose to number one. My update was to cover projects made between 1995 and 2014, which must have been the year I started thinking of myself seriously as an artist and the start of another story. In 1995, I published an illustrated book drawn with oil-paint, but stretched on canvas. I thought I should document it. In those days, documentation meant slides. In 1996, I bought a slide scanner.
Andrew Demirjian and Claudia Hart discuss emerging media, micro to macro.The weekly CAA Conversations Podcast continues the vibrant discussions initiated at our Annual Conference. Listen in each week as educators explore arts and pedagogy, tackling everything from the day-to-day grind to the big, universal questions of the field.
Claudia Hart’s A Child’s Machiavelli Book Release and Exhibition Opening at WallplayWallplay is pleased to host the newest edition of Claudia Hart’s A Child’s Machiavelli, published by Beatrice Books and edited by Patrick Reynolds. The original 1998 Penguin edition has been redesigned in collaboration with the author, and will be available for purchase on December 1st, 2019 through Amazon Books. A Child’s Machiavelli was initially written and illustrated by Hart in 1995, inspired by Niccolo Machiavelli’s Renaissance treatise, The Prince, long considered the first book of political philosophy. Hart’s version began as a series of oil paintings and small catalog, produced by the Realismus Studio, at the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin, 1995.
Claudia Hart announced as apexart FellowThe ApexArt Fellowship is an alternative educational program that invites creative individuals to leave their familiar surroundings for a month-long stay in an unfamiliar city. The program provides new sources of inspiration through exposure to new cultures, interests, and experiences.
How Media Artists Relate to Art History: The Case of Claudia HartClaudia Hart is a pioneer of media art, one of the very few that worked at the onset of merging art and simulation technologies in the 1990s. But is being technologically vanguard enough for artists to gain credibility? Is it just about mastering new tools? These questions ask to ponder the blurring of roles between a creative and an engineer or IT specialist.
Claudia Hart, The Ruins, opens at bitforms galleryThe Ruins implements still lifes, the classical form of a memento mori, to contemplate the decay of western civilization. In this exhibition, Hart revises the canons of modernist painting and the manifestos of failed utopias. Exhibited works are meditations on the flow of history, expressed as a cycle of decay and regeneration.