bitforms
New York City
bitforms.com
@bitforms / info@bitforms.com / Future Fair Voices: Steven Sacks / Artsy
‘Hybrid Garden’, the title of the presentation by bitforms gallery, proposes a dual inquiry: how does nature influence digital systems, and how do these systems interpret the natural world? Artists Sara Ludy, Quayola, and Clement Valla employ a unique variety of techniques, ranging from photogrammetry to generative video, that present a means of communication between real and hyperreal environments.
Quayola employs technology as a lens to explore the tensions and equilibriums between seemingly opposing forces. Pleasant Places challenges the photographic image and proposes alternative modes of vision and synthesis: familiar landscapes are transformed into dense and impenetrable masses of geometries. The landscape serves as a point of departure, paying homage to the tradition of landscape painting in Western art, while also alluding to a pivotal moment within its history when representation began to verge on abstraction.
Sara Ludy’s work is informed by the mutability of the natural world. Through her interdisciplinary practice, forms emerge at the confluence of nature, architecture, abstraction, and the unconscious. Ludy’s newest body of work epitomizes the notion of hybridity through glass and copper sculpture as well as digital painting. Her image-making process embodies a digital catharsis, or mythology, where images are refigured for a corporeal experience.
Clement Valla rationalizes the myth of the natural world through digital rendering, generating a translation between real and hyperreal. His practice is characterized by visible traces of simulation and manufacture that embrace a commingling of natural objects with digital processes. The resulting artworks evince dynamic natural forces that have been at work for aeons.
Founded in 2001, bitforms gallery represents established, mid-career, and emerging artists critically engaged with new technologies. Spanning the rich history of media art through its current developments, the gallery’s program offers an incisive perspective on the fields of digital, internet, time-based, and new media art forms.
Supporting and advocating for the collection of ephemeral, time-based, and digital art works since its founding, bitforms gallery artists are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Center for Art and Media (ZKM), Karlsruhe; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, among other institutions internationally.