The Real and the Represented

Artists: Leanne Eisen, Erika Lynne Hanson, Bradley Hyppa, Hector Llanquin, Tom Pnini, and Clement Valla

July 18-August 26, 2011

Little Paper Planes’ premiere online exhibition, Series Circuit, was themed around notions of multiples, collectable, and affordable objects of art. The objects existed in an actual exhibition space, though for the majority of its viewers, were experienced solely through online representation. For the second exhibition, we have decided to concentrate on this important facet of LPP, online art and accessibility. Here, we will turn from material objects of art and their digital representation, to digital technology as the artworks themselves.

The mediated experience of artwork is often an attempt to represent something and to communicate and share the experience of that something. Traditionally this representation has occurred in paintings, drawings, sculpture, and the hand-made. With the advent of photography, traditional modes of representation were re-examined, and new questions arose surrounding ideas of what was indeed real, and what was representational. Today again, in many parts of the world, we find ourselves in an era of an ever-expanding digital media, where the possibilities for exploration of this media are seemingly endless.

Boundaries are again blurred between the real and the represented. The represented in many ways, has become the understood real. For example, we must constantly remind ourselves that many artists’ websites are not showing the work itself, but rather representations of the real. For this exhibit, I wanted to showcase works that exist primarily through digital means. Here, the online experience does not create a distance, but rather provides the experience of the work itself, where the represented is the real.

Ironically, some of the works in the show use digital media to accentuate the distance of the represented. Erika Lynn Hanson creates abstracted landscapes from ephemeral materials, and captures the subtle shifts of nature in her Glacial Observation video series. Inspired by the work and processes of Hudson River Valley school artists, she attempts to represent a moment in time that exist only as that, a moment.

A similar gesture is made by Tom Pnini in his Demo video series. For these, Pnini begins sculpturally with a traditional theatrical set, constructed in public settings, and brought to life with the help of friends.  The experience is filmed on digital video, and the end result is both a mesmerizing illusion, and an obvious artifice. The viewer is caught in perpetual cycles of the suspension of disbelief, nostalgia, and humor. Ultimately, the work is a described by the artist as a “failure” at capturing the quintessence of a sunset.

While Pnini’s “failure” is through the result a large scale human group effort, the work of Hector Llanquin’s Sunset series is based on the failures of software programming.  In an attempt to transmit photos online, he discovered a glitch in the program. Learning to control this glitch, Llanquin has created a series of impossible sunsets that read like hiccups of personal memory.

In a similar vein, Leanne Eisen has experimented with scanner glitches to such a degree as to have control over intentional creations. While she uses a variety of objects for these abstractions, shown in this exhibit are the scans of CDs and DVDs. Here, Eisen has turned the digitalization process back onto itself by creating a digitalized glitch of digital storage media. The ultimate digital image turns back in appearance to look like natural landscapes.

The work of Clement Valla is created from systems that produce unintended artifacts, as well as self-made generative programs. For his Seed Drawings and A Sequence of Circles Traced by Five Hundred Individuals, Valla asked individual online users to participate in copying and tracing simple line drawings. In the case of Seed Drawings, the resulting image is an aggregate of many smaller drawings, all produced as copies of one another. For Postcards from Google Earth, Bridges, Valla has collected images from Google Earth that feature glitches in the two-dimensional representation of the various bridge structures of highway systems. The result is an unintentionally humorous representation of the real, and a rather alarming digital interpretation of geography.

Exploration of space and place is also found in the work of Bradley Hyppa. His videos are comprised of distorted and pulsing color patterns, and shifts the perception of background and foreground. In the work the things you could do you won't but you might, fields of color are interspersed with the occasional glitch, the results are transfixing and mesmerizing.  Hyppa purposely does not provide concrete answers to questions of place, but rather lets us bask in the space of its contemplation.

The works in the show all function as their own art objects, experienced primarily online. In addition to this, we wanted in to make an archival object in conjunction with the digital exhibit, in order to have something tangible. We have invited the artists to work on a parallel project, and hope that this will be a platform to explore their ideas outside the digital realm. The catalogue will be available before the closing of the exhibit at the end of August.

Curated by Hillary Wiedemann, Catalogue by Kelly Lynn Jones, Online Exhibition organized by Hillary Wiedemann and Kelly Lynn Jones