September 6 – October 27, 2024
Reception for the Artists – Saturday September 7th 6 – 8pm
With great power comes great responsibility.
The power of visual images and the unregulated dynamic of AI have created a world untethered from reality. Disinformation and misinformation in this election year is at an all time high. The ability to think critically is challenged. The general public being swayed or falling into rabbit holes or the digital abyss is not only possible but probable. Artificial intelligence, taking data sets to perform complex tasks to mimic human behavior including the various virtual assistants like ChatGPT or Gemini, or art generators Mid-Journey, Dall-E all scrape data in a large feast, learning, growing, expanding. The programs complex computations become better at anticipating behaviors and inevitably rewrite our history based on the information exchange.
This exhibition, focused on Artificial Intelligence, includes five artists all looking at the complexities of the visual image as truth, fiction, muse and outlier. All use technology to inform their work, stretch their truth, follow myths and legends, rewrite history and manufacture new realities.
Josh Azzarella
I create still images, video, and objects from important cultural images by altering or removing the punctual event in the image. The works explore the power of authorship in collective memory. This multidisciplinary studio practice is rooted in the scrutiny of popular historiography and the indexical document. Through various methods I seek to interrupt, displace or interfere with the images that make up our personal and shared histories. This practice of arrogation allows me to confuse, append, or create a new memory for the viewer. In this way I interrupt the stream of information and imagery that is disseminated, filtered, and collected. The works find context in our personal memory and in the larger postmodern conversation about what is real. We often note, in trying to understand our own history, that the photographs which signify the events we experience come to replace or complicate our own memories. In this way, I intend the works I produce to further alter those collective memories. Moreover, the works often seek a meditative or still moment during which the viewer can stand transfixed. This contemplative moment is an opportunity to introduce the larger context in which we collect and chronicle our communal history. — Josh Azzarella
Rashed Haq — Plausible Presidents
“Plausible Presidents” explores the complex interplay between perception, imagery, and history, underscored by the pervasive contemporary issue of disinformation in our digital era. This project presents a series of digitally crafted photographs of the first sixteen US Presidents, covering a time period from before the invention of photography until photography was fairly prevalent. The portraits, while visually plausible, are intellectually known as fabrications, challenging viewers to confront their immediate acceptance of photographic information as factual — sometimes allowing critical thinking to be overlooked in the face of compelling imagery
Each photographic portrait is crafted using generative AI, drawing from historical textual descriptions,
paintings, sculptures, and where available, photographs, to resonate with the persona and epoch of the respective presidents. Generative AI is adept at creating images with perceptual realism using multimodal input of text and images. This process, blending historical accuracy with artistic interpretation, aims to materialize the unseen and question the seen. The text descriptions are also created with generative AI, with its potential for bias and inaccuracy in the captions.
In an age where digital manipulation is seamless and widespread, “Plausible Presidents” serves as a mirror reflecting our vulnerabilities in discerning truth from fabrication, including mine. It reminds us how easily our perception can be swayed by images with perceptual realism, and a call to critically evaluate the authenticity and implications of the visuals we encounter.
Hayley Lohn — Capital Gains
Hayley Lohn was born in Vancouver, Canada. She is an artist, photographer, and videographer currently based in Vancouver. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Psychology from the University of Western Ontario and graduated from the International Center of Photography’s Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism program in 2021. Her work explores topics related to technology, nature, and psychology.
Orejarena & Stein — American Glitch
American Glitch examines the slip between fact and fiction and its manifestation in the physical landscape of the United States, the duo’s adopted home. Orejarena & Stein lead us to examine that amidst an overwhelming sea of unending information available in an instant, society is left asking what is real and what’s fake. What can the world trust, and what is a ‘glitch’?
To Orejarena & Stein, screen dominance, conspiracy theories, fake news, and the advent of the Metaverse call to question our reality and our potential existence in a ‘simulation,’ a term employed as a satirical collective protest against late-stage capitalism and an increased dependence on technology. To exist in an online community is to bear witness to the ‘simulation’, where images are posted as personal evidence of spotting a ‘glitch in our reality.’ A concept initially explored in films such as ‘The Matrix’ and ‘The Truman Show,’ a ‘glitch’ reflects a generation’s collective experience wherein the digital and physical worlds have merged; a world in which five senses seem inadequate against campaigns of conspiracy.
The artists spent years treating the internet as our collective subconscious, collating posts on social media and Reddit threads of ‘evidence of glitches in real life’. These threads and images become a place for a new form of community and connection across time and space. Orejarena & Stein then photograph sites around the US which remind them or people on the internet of real-life glitches. Such locations include California City – the blueprint of a perfect town – replete with ‘paper roads,’ avenues, and cul-desacs, which were never completed; or a staged Iraqi village at Fort Irwin, the U.S. Army base in the Mojave Desert.
About the Artists
Orejarena & Stein (b. Colombia, 1994 & UK, 1994) are a multimedia artist duo based in New York. Their work examines the intersection of technology, memory, and the duo’s desire to explore American mythologies and narratives. Fascinated with the emergent properties inherent to photographing as a pair using only a single camera, their practice explores collaboration in an individualistic medium. Orejarena & Stein conduct extensive research into collective image production within a world saturated by visual images. Their work has been exhibited internationally and can be found within public and private collections.
Phillip Toledano — Another America
Another America is an invented history of New York City from 1940-1950, with accompanying short stories by New Yorker writer John Kenney.
Truth in America has been slowly dying over the last decade. The country is consumed with conspiracy theories. For millions, facts are a choice. For millions, history is a choice. The arrival of AI is the next stage in the demise of truth. We can recreate the world as it never was. For every conspiracy theory, there can be visual proof. Convincing evidence that makes the lie real.
Another America takes this idea and creates a history that never existed. A world complete with people, events, and disasters, couched in the veracity of the past. Did this really happen? Is this real history? The images are simultaneously familiar and strange, much like the world in which we live.
