Unstable Objects, Synthesis Gallery
synthesis gallery presents UNSTABLE OBJECTS|Online, an online exhibition going live May 25, 2023, on New Art City
The contemporary visual universe has become an uncanny, quirky, mixed up place: gifs, photoshopping, GAN, remixes, deep fakes and memes have made their way from the depths of the digital world into our everyday lives. Images have become unstable objects, as art historian Valentina Tanni refer to them: they are made, sent, resent, distorted, manipulated by human and non-human life forms, and the growing and accelerating dissemination of their contents and contexts affects systems of power and changes the way we perceive reality.
Bringing together works by Casey Kauffmann, Katherine Mills Rymer, Nicoleta Mures and Romain Thibault, UNSTABLE OBJECTS|Online highlights this new era of images and their power to reflect our fragmented, hybrid, hyper- stimulated selves. Either taken from popular culture or created from scratch, distorted upon themselves or remixed in the primordial swirl of the internet, the works on display stand as a form of critique and celebration. Romain Thibault's project “Cognitive Distortions” is about automatic thought patterns that cause individuals to perceive reality inaccurately and negatively. This phenomenon is explored through the lens of our current image culture. Katherine Mills Rymer's sister works “Face Like A Cave” and “Hairy Melty” explore ideas of the socialized self, the private self and the paradisiacal online self. Each work seeks to understand internal shame, infinite circularity and digital entanglement. Casey Kauffmann's “Cursed AF” series of GIFs explore the concept of cursed content, a type of online content and popular subculture that is considered disturbing, unsettling or even frightening. Nicoleta Mures' collages explore the overwhelming nature of our always- connected society, highlighting the alienation that comes with living in a world where we are always online but never truly present. The artworks are placed in dialogue with a virtual environment architecturally designed by Mohsen Hazrati, to recall the overflowing and breached out stream of the web.
UNSTABLE OBJECTS is curated by Rebecca Manzoni and co-curated by Giorgio Vitale.