Among the most recognizable forms of art for many, landscape paintings in their simplest form are efforts to capture and represent the natural world around us on canvas or other mediums. The beauty of our natural surroundings offers both a comfort based on our own experiences and yet provides a wide range of subject possibilities including mountains, valleys, hills, rivers, forests, and the coastline and other familiar natural settings.
It’s moments like these that remind me of the power of art to bring people together to create a place where diverse ideas are shared and people connect. This exhibition brings artists, scholars and visitors together with the goal to examine what is powerful today. This endeavor is made possible by the generosity of Larry Janss, Shawn and Letal Skelton, Margaret Fieweger and the City of Thousand Oaks.
January 19, 2018 to April 15, 2018
Strings: Data and the Self, is the West Coast premiere exhibition of groundbreaking new media artists that challenge “traditional” notions of art making. Strings explores the manner in which data increasingly determines our behavior, our interactions and our overall relationship to the Self.
Shawné Michaelain Holloway is a Chicago based new media artist using sound, video, and performance to shape the rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. She has spoken and exhibited work internationally in spaces like The New Museum (New York, NY), Sorbus Galleria (Helsinki, Fi), on NTS Radio (London, UK) and was one of the 2017 residents at The Center for Afrofuturist Studies (Iowa City, IA.) She teaches in the New Arts Journalism department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Jennifer Chan is a Canadian video and media artist and curator based in Toronto. Her work addresses internet pop culture, specifically the representation of masculinity and the various constructions of femininity under the male gaze.
Amanda Turner Pohan received her BFA from The School of Visual Arts and an MFA from Hunter College. Pohan is currently working on The Linqox Criss Cycle, a five-part series of installations detailing the journey of Second Lifeavatar Linqox Criss as she slips between digital and physical embodiment. Each iteration manifests as scent, sculpture, sound, text, video and performance within a immersive environment. Through this project, Pohan asks, who is the avatar, where does her body begin and end, how does she thrive, what does she smell like. received her BFA from The School of Visual Arts and an MFA from Hunter College.
Branger_Briz is a full service digital agency and lab made up of artists, strategists, educators and programmers bent on articulating contemporary culture. Based in Miami FL, Chicago IL, and Cali, Colombia, they create work that provides context and perspective on the misunderstood aspects of the digital landscape.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg is a transdisciplinary artist and educator who is interested in art as research and critical practice. Her controversial biopolitical art practice includes the project Stranger Visions in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material (hair, cigarette butts, chewed up gum) collected in public places.
New media art has come to describe an open-ended genre of artistic practice that utilizes newly developed media technology to produce works of art. Media is a key term here in that it implies that technology is not exterior to human experience, but is used as a tool for human communication and connection.
Data is a force and we need to understand the power it holds over us and the power we yet hold over it. To engage with data, the traces we leave behind, we must first look at how it is collected. Our first two artists in Strings look at two very different types of traces we leave in the wake of our lives.
