ART SG | 2023: BOOTH: RE08

Gazelli Art House is delighted to present a group showing of digital works for their inaugural participation in ART SG, featuring technology-driven works by Brendan Dawes, Jake Elwes, Auriea Harvey, Libby Heaney, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Michael Takeo Magruder, Alexander Reben, and Nye Thompson x UBERMORGEN. The booth is a testament to the gallery’s history of promoting innovative art forms through their renowned programme GAZELL.iO, established in 2015 to bring together works by outstanding artists working in the digital field. Visitors to ART SG can find Gazelli Art House in the Reframe sector of the fair (booth RE08), showcasing work across sculpture and screen, and also in the New Now section, showcasing work by represented artist Jake Elwes.

Created specifically for the fair, Brendan Dawes Infinite Glimpses (2022) builds on the artist’s signature use of formal simplicity alongside advanced technology. Using real-time generative processes and daily, ten-minute screenshots taken in May 2022, this work creates an infinite number of obfuscated images of the artist’s digital workspace. Each composition fades over a period of thirty seconds and, once completely faded, will never be seen again.

In Auriea Harvey’s presentation of works from 2021, sculpture exists in both the digital (The Mystery v5-dv1 (gold stack)) and physical realms (The Mystery v5). Symbolic imagery evoking concepts of Memento Mori is found in the skull (bone), a face (nature), a rose (beauty), and a braid (death). Using self-portraiture, Harvey is inserting an African-American woman into art history, an overdue revision of the narrative.

Participation is just as vital in touch is response-ability (2020) by Libby Heaney. Participants’ touch controls the artwork frames in this site-specific, interactive animation. The work exposes Heany’s research into biases present in representations of the body in computer vision, artificial intelligence, and art history. Heaney uses quantum computing and computer vision algorithm – Open-Pose – as artistic tools in transforming imagery.

In Saliva (2022), Lauren Lee McCarthy stages questions about body politics and ownership. Visitors will be invited to take part in an exchange of biodata and, in so doing, store representations of this data on the blockchain. 

Within a morphing digital landscape, Michael Takeo Magruder’s Imaginary Cities — London (11010962736) (2019) is a real-time, generative work that delivers ephemeral visuals accompanied by an algorithmic soundscape. The artwork draws from a historical map of late-Georgian London that is part of the British Library’s One Million Images from Scanned Books collection. A Flash program running on the system composes the scene from a dataset containing an entire year (2018) of processed image material generated by the project’s online server application.

Extending his explorations into the inherently human nature of the artificial, Alexander Reben presents debut ceramic sculptures. These artworks are the direct result of the artist’s experimentations in human-machine collaborations at the forefront of AI technology and pose interesting questions pertaining to authorship and process. 

From their award-winning film, UNINVITED (2018-present), Nye Thompson and UBERMORGEN will exhibit UNINVITED Unseen (2022) a series of videos which are an NFT collection. UNINVITED Unseen presents a multidimensional synthetic organism, and unfolds a ground-breaking way to collect and own an artist’s film.

For the New Now section of the fair, Zizi & Me - Anything you can do (I Can Do Better) (2020) by Jake Elwes in collaboration with Me the Drag Queen uses cabaret and musical theatre to challenge narratives surrounding AI and society. As part of The Zizi Project (2019-ongoing), Zizi & Me - Anything you can do (I Can Do Better) explores the intersections of drag performance and AI using neural networks and deep-fake technology.