FRIDMAN GALLERY

Today, our experience of the environment is modified by the use of technology and confined to urban planning. Our ever-growing communities no longer allow for an undomesticated state of wilderness. Technology functions as a tool with which we relate to our habitat, enabling us to select, loop and screen our experience of the natural phenomena obscured by the cityscape. Our computers and cell phones have become cozy portals into nature.

 

Landscape with Devices, opening on August 28th, 2014 at FRIDMAN GALLERY, presents the works of three artists who reinterpret nature for the digital age.  

 

Noa Dolberg’s Gadgets For the Cave Man II, is a representation of a living campfire, created with flickering light bulbs and the crackling sounds of fire. The gallery space turns into a cave, recalling the surroundings of early humans during the night, in a safe and intimate way. Phillip Stearns’ multimedia installation proposes a parallel view of the idyllic sunset, one that is altered and transformed by computer technology. A random image of a sunset is repeatedly scanned and processed pixel-by-pixel, while simultaneously being projected onto gallery walls. Esther Ruiz’s sculptural works of concrete, neon and plexiglass create fictional landscapes. Various sized totems of self-contained narratives, they are objects of an imaginary natural world -- past, future and outer-planetary.  

​

Seen together, these artists’ works become tools for creating landscapes of convenience. Nature is no longer noisy, scary, isolated or removed from us; it can now be switched on and off, rearranged and customized until it becomes our intimate playground.

​

​

press release pdf