In Its Image
July 19 - Aug 24 2014
Zachary Davis
Harm van den Dorpel
Kareem Lotfy
Hayley A. Silverman
Opening Reception: July 19, 2014
424 Gates Ave
Brooklyn NY 11216
So much beauty in the world, so few eyes to see it.
- Albert Cossery
American Medium is proud to present In Its Image, a collection of new work by Zachary Davis, Harm van den Dorpel, Kareem Lotfy, and Hayley A. Silverman. In Its Image will be on view from July 19th to August 24th 2014
Within each of their practices, the artists pull out neural tokens from the constant stream - each work existing as a node, a flourish arising from a greater body of perceptual content or sociological experience. Each of these creations are streams of consciousness in a solid state. In this moment they are tangible, yet carry with them trails out of the past and into the future - between the outgrowth of consciousness through the millennia and the thoughts of entities not yet created to perceive these streams.
Tapestries woven from an ancient oasis, some thousands of years in the making, sit fresh and vibrating, now spattered with bit-mapped jewels and sluggish pools of distorted mosaic. Hypothetical images hallucinated by the wanderings of a mind’s eye rest with a housecat. A stone, a bowl, an image. These are the marks of a calligrapher, the marks of a cartoonist, the marks of an algorithm, the marks of a tool without a hand.
Artificial intelligences compose images with a human partner. Humans impose time on the immortal. How does a human consciousness relate to an artificial sensibility? What has been imagined and who (or what) has been imagining? What structures lay across and within? What structures lay outside our perceptual ability?
You should come close to me tonight wayfarer
For I will be celebrating you.
Your beauty still causes me madness,
Keeps the neighbours complaining
When I start shouting in the middle of the night
Because I can't bear all this joy.
I will be giving birth to suns.
I will be holding forests upside down
Gently shaking soft animals from trees and burrows
Into my lap.
What you conceive as imagination
Does not exist for me.
Whatever you can do in a dream
Or on your mind-canvas
My hands can pull - alive - from my coat pocket.
But let's not talk about my divine world.
For what I most want to know
Tonight is:
All about you.
- “Imagination Does Not Exist”, Hafiz b. 1320
I am in this somewhere. You are also. From chaos comes the differentiated, the analyzed, the me and the you. As do the ones we fear and the ones we love. We are all arising into the mind, and then fading back into the murk - for ourselves, for each other, and for that which we cannot know. We are all arising from the bounty of our universe, set in motion by invisible forces and frozen by our mind’s eye in the eternal now.
Zachary Davis, Harm van den Dorpel, Kareem Lotfy, Hayley A. Silverman, American Medium, New York
http://www.americanmedium.net