Threaded Frequencies: LoVid

This follows on from the artist duo’s GAZELL.iO digital residency in November 2024. Known for their layered approach to craft, code, and handmade hardware, LoVid brings together embroidered textiles and experimental video to reflect on the porous boundaries between organic and digital forms. 

The exhibition coincides with LoVid’s inclusion in two major institutional exhibitions: Electric Op at the Musée d’arts de Nantes (travelling from the Buffalo AKG Museum), and Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms, opening July 2025 at the Toledo Museum of Art.

LoVid’s practice explores the boundaries between the digital and the tactile, the bodily and the virtual. Their embroidered works echo the glitches and textures of analogue video, while their moving image pieces conjure a sense of sensory dissonance—where sound and pattern unfold with visceral immediacy. By reimagining the visual language of early electronic media through hand-crafted processes, LoVid resists the slickness of commercial digital aesthetics, offering instead a layered, embodied experience of contemporary technological
life.

Throughout their two-decade collaboration, LoVid has developed a singular visual and sonic language—rooted in experimentation, intimacy, and resistance to obsolescence. The works presented in Threaded Frequencies trace the tension between connection and interference, nature and signal, permanence and decay.

A key work on view is cell-a-scape (2015), a four-and-a-half-minute video that epitomises LoVid’s exploration of the blurred line between natural environments and technological simulation. In this piece, colourful static and electronically generated patterns resembling geometric leaves flow in sync with a rhythmic electronic soundtrack. Layered against this are fleeting glimpses of foliage through a window—nature captured, flattened, and digitally recast. The work evokes a landscape mediated through screens, echoing LoVid’s earliest electronic signal based works such as Breaking and Entering the Lost Time Frame (2003), and underscores the duo’s focus on the shifting materialities of perception. cell-a-scape is part of a broader catalogue of LoVid’s video works distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), a pioneering platform for media art that houses many of the duo’s seminal moving image pieces.

Also on display is Extant Maculata (Landscape) (2020), one of LoVid’s intricate painted and embroidered textile works created through a process of digital imaging, dye-sublimation, and hand embellishment—an emblem of their practice’s hybridised aesthetic of touch, texture, and signal disruption. A highlight of the exhibition is Hugs on Tape (Shimmy) (2024), the final animation from LoVid’s Hugs on Tape series. Rooted in gestures of touch and affection, the work channels digital abstraction through analogue signal interference. Two of the works from this series are held in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Additional new tapestries by LoVid will be unveiled in July in a room in the gallery’s main space, timed to coincide with Jane McAdam Freud: An Absent Presence, a major retrospective of the British sculptor presented in dialogue with works by Louise Bourgeois and Holly Stevenson.