“Adrienne Crossman’s Series #1 produces complex visual effects through the application of the deconstructive video editing technique known as datamoshing. By deleting the key frames that comprise digital videos, in this case gleaned from YouTube, Crossman reveals the components that allow them to function while producing stunningly colourful results. These digital yet painterly abstractions connote the visual possibilities latent within digital media.
Through the re-presentation of well-known masterpieces, Crossman highlights the anti-canonical nature of the glitch genre and the challenges that face new media art in the context of the conventional art institution. The use of the glitch as applied to these traditional works disrupts notions of the art historical canon, breaking apart its authoritative and exclusive underpinnings. Contrasting these two media forms, painting and glitch video raises questions surrounding the presentation, preservation, and production of digital art works, problematizing typical exhibition practices.”
- Shauna Jean Doherty in her writing about SYS.TE/M FAIL.U+RE: Revelations of the Interface, an MFA Thesis Exhibit, March, 2014
Cat Bluemke, Jazmine V. K. Carr, Colin Rosati and Niki Sehmbi
Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto, Ontario; November 6 - December 12, 2015
100percentreal features the work of four emerging internet-aware artists based in Toronto, Canada. The exhibition is made up of two components; the IRL Embassy at Xpace Cultural Centre running from November 6 – December 12, 2015, and the digital exhibition hosted online at onehundredpercentreal.net as part of The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale. Curated by Adrienne Crossman, 100percentreal includes the work of Cat Bluemke, Jazmine VK Carr, Niki Sehmbi and Colin Rosati. Working within the realms of both digital and physical space, these artists are renegotiating the relationship between the digital and the physical, the synthetic and the ‘real’.
In describing her work, Jazmine V. K. Carr says, “Impermanence and documentation are
essential qualities in preserving the work. The treatment of objects is intimate, personal,
process based and repetitive,” words that speak to both her IRL and URL projects in
100percentreal. Carr’s online project, Epilogue (1 &2) consists of a 26-minute video documenting a durational performance in which the artist repeats the process of
‘deleting’ physical photographs by treating them with bleach. Carr, clad in a facemask
and protective gloves, inhabits the video frame, seated around a large bucket of bleach.
She immerses individual photographs in the substance one by one, taking a moment to
watch the physical image brighten then literally drip off the paper, leaving behind only
the materiality of the now blank photograph. The photos were sourced from Carr’s
personal and family archives, ranging from those given to her by her mother and
grandmother, as well those shot by Carr herself. She describes the process as an
“intimate way of releasing myself from certain memories and certain pasts.” Instead of
simply throwing them out, Carr goes through this process of ‘deleting,’ enacting a
physical reversal of the photographic process, resulting in a type of cathartic healing.
This temporal performance lives on only as digital documentation on the internet,
A unifying theme throughout Cat Bluemke’s work is virtual tourism: “a simulation of an
existing location, usually composed of a sequence of videos or still images.” International Brand Expansion (IBE) is a collaborative project between Bluemke and her
collective Tough Guy Mountain. The work consists of both digital as well as IRL
components. Hosted online, a series of GIFs and JPEG images represent a virtual gallery
space or showroom, the work takes the form of 3D rendered textiles featuring imagery of
famous international tourist destinations. The designs were inspired by search engine
results yielded when inputting the destinations, often producing idyllic hyperreal
renderings of the real locations. These textile works have also been rendered physically
via digital printing, and hang on the gallery walls of Xpace throughout the duration of the
IRL exhibit, extending the digital showroom to a real life gallery setting.
