exhibition at
Red Barn Project Space,
University of California
Santa Barbara (UCSB)

08.07 – 29.07.2015

Pixel by pixel, block by block, hair by hair, it’s all world building. Each instance based on a considered ecology of the image and all that it points to in history and fiction: it’s all done in post. Anna Zett’s Dinosaur.gif sends familiar images from Jurassic Park scrolling up as her essay takes form, parceled out text overlaid on the circular movements of the gif-ed dinos. The promise of the pixel, the ‘digital’ that begins in this 1993 film, is realized in realistic reptilian flesh; all the while the terror of technological failure is responsible narratively for the chaos caused by the unbound creatures. There is a spark in the pixels, in the eye of the T-Rex that looks back, catching our gaze. In Beatrice Gibson’s F for Fibonacci the protagonist from William Gaddis’ 1975 novel JR, an 11 year old capitalist, is given an ‘in-real-life’ avatar of approximately the same age. From page to body to block, Mr. Money is created, his world observed directly through his point of view, his reign over blocks absolute. Minecraft is the site of his office, against practicality, gravity, and spending limits. The image is simultaneously made and stretched. Rachel McRae’s SceneHepworth series considers the sculptures of Barbara Hepworth as proto-meme, proliferated and spread in their own right as well as endlessly echoed in art and pop-culture as a kind of essential modernist form. Embodying this Hepworth essence, masks are made in the familiar rounded, organic shape, punctuated by a single hole, all the way through, in this case becoming the cyclopic eye of the mask. In bright colors, streaks of hair extensions flow asymmetrically to the side of the mask-face, a marker of ‘scene-kid’ aesthetics: a now mostly defunct sub-culture primarily circulated during the prime of My Space in the mid 2000s and loosely associated with a sub-strata of Emo music, it was all about surface, the hair. A repetition of organic form in-organically. Pixel by pixel, block by block, hair by hair, it’s all happening again.

Works:

Dinosaur.gif
Anna Zett
2014-2015, 21:00,
silently scrolled gifs,
HD monitor.

F for Fibonacci
Beatrice Gibson
2014, 16:00, HD/16mm,
projection with sound.

SceneHepworth (series)
Rachel McRae
2014-ongoing,
5 sculptures/masks.

*Exhibition handout available here.

Dinosaur.gif, Anna Zett, 2014-2015

F for Fibonacci, Beatrice Gibson, 2014

Detail View: SceneHepworth (series), Rachel McRae,
2014-ongoing