Exhibition: March 12th – April 24th, 2016
Opening Reception: March 12th, 2016 7pm – 10pm
Artist Statement:
Escapism explores the spaces between worlds. It asks us, as viewers, to place ourselves somewhere between the analogue and the digital, between the physical and the virtual, challenging us to consider the ways in which these seemingly disparate worlds interact and overlap.
As active participants in a booming technological society, we are constantly glued to screens. But the visual images we see on them are fleeting, transient, and often difficult to retain. ePaper screens, developed to imitate paper, display information that is generated through reflection rather than projection from the screen itself, allowing for a longer meditation on the content appearing on the screen, notably the text of books. The works presented here use ePaper technology to capture fleeting digital images and lock them into a physical form, freezing them in time. These are digital images in their native state, with no mode of translation — no print out — and yet they have materiality. The technology has been stripped down to its very core, to the point of losing its utility. The ability to change the images has been removed, leaving just raw screens with components exposed and the images embedded within them. The imagery on the screens implies a liminality, an enigmatic edge between physical reality and virtual reality by approximating landscapes, seascapes, and skyscapes. Mountains, oceans, and clouds, are the primary scenes, but they have been created using the standard 3D programs used for movies, advertising, and animation, but in ways the programs were never intended to operate. Although the images are experienced by the viewer in two dimensions, the digital information used to virtually create them is actually three dimensional, employing coordinates on x,y, and z planes.
About the Artist:
Tim Schwartz (b. 1981 Boston, Massachusetts) is a Los Angeles-based artist, technologist, and activist who makes works of art focused on technology, information, privacy, and how our culture absorbs changes in these areas. He received a BA in Physics from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego. Schwartz has spent the last five years investigating what is lost as archives become digital. In 2010, he developed technology to help reunite missing people affected by the earthquake in Haiti and now organizes a group focused on family reunification after disasters.
“[He] makes his playful data mashups into sculptures using retired gadgets… Like a field scientist of the information age, Schwartz filters an overwhelming amount of data through the intuitive logic of old-fashioned tools such as weather gauges, maps, and charts. Taken together, his works constitute a kind of contemporary natural history museum in which we are the subjects being examined.”
-Lamar Clarkson, Modern Painters Magazine