SIRENS
SIRENS
Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville (TSA GVL) is excited to announce our next exhibition, SIRENS. This exhibition features work by artists and new Tiger Strikes Asteroid members Michaela Pilar Brown, Zen Cohen, Rebecca Forstater, Hani Le, and Dana Potter. Through installation and digital transformation, the exhibition investigates virtual landscapes and the ways environments, both physical and digital, are constructed. The artists use the gallery as a site to examine the reciprocal relationship between the digital world and the individual: how digital experiences shape us, and how we, in turn, shape them. The exhibition will run December 5th to January 9th at our gallery located in The Lofts of Greenville and Monaghan Mill. Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, December 5th from 6-10 pm.
Michaela Pilar Brown Michaela Pilar Brown’s installation Dancing Time is focused on grief and its relationship to the landscape. It’s an exploration of Black American burial rituals and ancestor reverence. She has chosen material gathered from land occupied by her family for more than two centuries, where her ancestors lived, loved and toiled. The primary element uses cedar trees historically planted at grave sites as a symbol of everlasting life, and includes bones, reflective material, sound and moving images to punctuate the deep and abiding connection to the life cycles of the land and the human tendency toward the collection of momentos.
Zen Cohen’s Southern Oracle is an interactive video installation made in response to the acceleration of machine learning, the magnitude of digital images rendered daily using this technology, and the role of the human collaborator in this hyper production. The installation utilizes a monitor lying flat on a pedestal underneath a suspended endoscope to perform video feedback. The viewer/participant is invited to infiltrate the video signal by moving their hands under the camera to generate additional feedback currents across the screen. Video feedback requires subtle camera movements for the image to continuously replicate itself and generate complex patterns, textures, and color variations. When users interact with their hands, skin tones generate dynamic variations in color and patterns. This interactivity is further mediated using TouchDesigner, a visual programming software designed for the installation to mix pre-recorded video clips of different water bodies (oceans, waterfalls, and floods). These video clips combined with the live camera, simulate additional currents or visual occurrences across the screen. Throughout the exhibit, interactions with the installation will be recorded to produce media files for extracting still frames for printmaking. In total, the installation and its iterative process of echoing digital images, functions as a generative machine.
Rebecca Forstater’s {Training_camp} examines the creation of public memory in the current AI-fueled rat race through the lens of pop-culture history. The works from Version 2.0 displayed in this exhibition focus on photographed moments of crisis involving female celebrities in the early 2000s that circulated widely as entertainment through early digital media. Forstater utilizes the materiality of emerging AI software to create these works, asking the training models to contextualize the past given the algorithm’s present pool of data. The results, imagery deeply rooted in social and cultural narratives surrounding gender, serve as a case study of biased ideologies embedded in our digital social consciousness. The objects and videos visualize peculiar amalgamations, attempting to reverse the uncomfortable, revealing fleeting instances of progress entangled with societal mistakes, and shapeshifting into new iterations.
Hani Le’s Ode to the Perfect Unicorn in My DM’s — She is the perfect friend, she is the comforting big sister, digital confidant, the secret you keep in your pocket, the one to spill all your heartfelt fears to; She is the elusive, ideal unicorn you are looking for. A virtual stranger that becomes a friend that becomes a confidant then turns into a flattened digital deity whose messages comfort your every woes. This unicorn is an avatar of netizens who fold themselves into the role of the therapist friend, the always-there friend, the instant notification bubble of comfort for someone spilling their sorrows. A feedback loop spawns of the sacrificial slivers one shows the internet of themselves—echoed back by the internet denizens who know only that persona—ritualizes these beings into an iconistic form. This unicorn lives a self-condemned existence trapped in an idyllic virtual landscape, cursed to forever play confidant to all they come across.
Dana Potter’s Am I the Only One Freaking Out Right Now is a video installation presented on a cellphone and TV display. A sequence of screen recordings from TikTok, focusing on a single, seemingly mundane product: tubing mascara. Potter collected hundreds of videos of people applying, removing, discussing, and promoting the mascara. The product’s popularity online is tied to its visual appeal in video: the act of removing the mascara with hot water, produces a black pigment that streaks down the cheeks. Watching someone do this is visually engaging and the action is reproducible. To emphasize this repetition and spectacle, Potter collages the original screen recordings in repeated and mirrored patterns which mimic kaleidoscopes or fun-house mirror
About TSA GVL
Tiger Strikes Asteroid is a 501(c)(3) non-profit network of independently programmed, artist-run exhibition spaces with locations in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Greenville, SC. Our goal is to collectively bring people together, expand connections, and create community through artist-initiated exhibitions, projects, and curatorial opportunities.
