The Garden of Emoji Delights
Installations- Thu 19.May @ 11:00 - 5/7/16 23:00
- Fri 20.May @ 11:00 - 5/7/16 23:00
- Sat 21.May @ 11:00 - 5/7/16 23:00
- Sun 22.May @ 11:00 - 5/7/16 23:00
The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch’s most ambitious work, embodies the conflicts, humor, darkness and absurdity of human, earthly and cosmological conditions. The current speed of technological advancement suggests humanity and the environment is irrevocably changing, but when we compare the visual vernacular of our day (symbols like Emoji for example), it is amazing to discover how easily they align with the symbology of a prescient artist from 500 years ago. This is not to say that evolution is not occurring, but to suggest that Bosch was one of those unique individuals who created works that transcend time.
One intention of my transcription of his work, in The Garden of Emoji Delights, was to mash up popular historic and contemporary sign systems, and to diversify and expand the Emoji lexicon through this process. Emoji are a contemporary glyph system which offer an emotional shorthand for virtual expression. The pleasurable stylizations are ubiquitous worldwide and across generations.
Transcribing visual symbologies of an earlier era using Emoji makes perfect “nonsense-sense” to me, particularly with Bosch’s work, in that his own visual style was so idiosyncratic and remarkably distinct in contrast to his peers.
ARTISTS
Carla Gannis (USA)
Carla Gannis identifies as a visual storyteller. With the use of 21st Century representational technologies she narrates through a “digital looking glass” where reflections on power, sexuality, marginalization, and agency emerge. She is fascinated by digital semiotics and the situation of identity in the blurring contexts of real and virtual. Gannis holds an MFA in painting from Boston University and is the recipient of several awards, including a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Grant in Computer Arts. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including TRANSFER Gallery, DAM Gallery and The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Features on her work have appeared in ARTnews, The Huffington Post, Wired, Hyperallergic, Art F City, The Creators Project, The New York
Times and The LA Times, among others. In 2015 Gannis’s speculative fiction was included in DEVOURING THE GREEN:: fear of a human planet: a cyborg / eco poetry anthology, published by Jaded Ibis Press.
She has also participated on numerous panels regarding intersections in art and technology including “Let’s Get Digital” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and “Not Your Mom’s Anthropocene” at Creative Technology Week, NYC.
She is Assistant Chair of The Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY.
