Event Description
Please join the Pearlstein Gallery for the closing of our summer exhibitions, Digital Twin, curated by Micah Lockman-Fine and Heavy Merge, by local artists Carolyn Healy and John Phillips.
Heavy Merge is a new multimedia installation by sculptor Carolyn Healy and audio-video artist John Phillips.
Inspired by a three-pound blob of warm, wet, living matter networked by
billions of synapses, the artists take a personal look at the matrix
that mysteriously gives rise to consciousness. For Healy and Philips,
the brain is a wonderland of feedback and freewheeling interconnection
that melds sensory perception and stored experiences into unique inner
landscapes. They are fascinated by our powers of awareness, imagination
and abstraction and by the sometimes unruly mental functions that seem
to operate without us. Their site-specific installation juxtaposes
sculptures and shadows with video feedback projections and soundscape to
approximate the boundless creative activity in our brains that allows
us to feel human.
Carolyn Healy is an installation
artist who began her career exhibiting small, abstract assemblages of
found objects in 1979 at the Marian Locks Gallery, Philadelphia. Since
1987, she has created numerous large site-specific installation pieces,
many in collaboration with audio-video artist John Phillips. These have
been seen nationally and internationally in museums, university
galleries, theaters, as well as rough industrial and alternative sites.
Carolyn has received five individual Artist Fellowships in
Interdisciplinary Art from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and
grants from the Leeway Foundation, the Dietrich Foundation and the
Pollock Krasner Foundation.
John Phillips is a
sound and video artist. His work has included interactive sound
installations and audio-visual performances in museums, art galleries,
and non-traditional spaces in this country and abroad. Since 1987, he
has collaborated extensively with sculptor Carolyn Healy on site-based
installations. His musical compositions have been presented at dance and
theater venues, on the nationally syndicated radio program New American
Radio, and at national and international electronic art festivals. His
composing has been supported by American Composers Forum (collaboration
with Pauline Oliveros) and the Millay Colony (composer in residence). To
pursue his video work, he has enjoyed residencies at the Experimental
Television Center and at Signal Culture, both in Owego, New York. Grants
include a fellowship in Sound Art from the National Endowment for the
Arts and several in Media Arts from the Pennsylvania Council on the
Arts. Digital Twin showcases
Drexel Westphal faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students who
transform human experience through digital rendering, exploring the
sublime and chilling effects of technology on physical and psychological
existence.
As humans interact with digital spaces, our data is
formed into thousands of “twins” which claim to represent our behavior,
preferences, and personas. What do we share with our recreations? How
does living beside them shift our data so that our twins morph alongside
us?
These nine artists employ video, speculative design,
interactivity, ceramic 3D printing, and assemblage to probe digital
doubling technologies, and to imagine paths forward for reclaiming human
agency beside our digital twins. Reverent and profane, farcical and
severe, unnerving and uplifting, Digital Twin showcases the Westphal
community as it wrestles with some of the most pressing creative
problems of the digital age.
Curated by Micah Lockman-Fine,
a Drexel MS Design Research candidate who crafts exhibitions,
performances, and experiments to build progressive speculative futures.
Featuring work by Rghad
Balkhyoor, Lewis Colburn, Ann T. Dinh, Nicole Feller Johnson, Emil
Polyak, Tin Ta, Victoria Wohlforth, Darren Woodland, and Cooper Wright. |
