Through September 6, 2012
In a really provocative, technically complex multimedia collaboration, Jed Berk and Oliver McIrwin point us toward a world where the lines between the natural and the technologically imagined will be blurred, or even lost. We all know it is coming, and Berk and McIrwin are most certainly artists of this generation who obviously see the brave new world of headsets and virtuality less as menace and more as promise. They have fluidly fused art with the most sophisticated technologies to produce a fanciful, imagined, digitally enhanced cyber "nature," where settled notions of the natural and the engineered really fade.
Using all manner of computer and arts media, the duo have created sculptures, photographs and video that produce a sort of "eco system" of tomorrow. You walk in and your are "there." And "there" is neither brittle, wholly metallic nor cold. The references to flora and fauna transmitted via bpi move lushly, are in colors that entice and amaze, and at their best create aesthetic and emotional reactions as intense as walking up by accident on a field of wild flowers. If in some projected future we indeed will be living in fully or mostly cyber spaces, then these artists are pointing us toward how that eventuality might remain visually human and emotionally stirring. Am I ready for their world? Not quite.
