Saturday February 20, 7:30pm
Touching Pixels
GIFs and Videos by Faith Holland
artist in person
“Graceful Machines”, animated GIF by Faith Holland – courtesy of the artist
We are excited to welcome to the gallery artist Faith Holland for the program Touching Pixels, a screening of twelve videos created over the past five years. A looping reel of a series of her animated GIFs made during the same period will be played prior to the screening.
Holland’s wit and keen sense of Internet culture opens up a dialogue on how the Internet affects the ways we interact through digital space. Many of the works employ a vibrant, lo-fi aesthetic that boldly investigates how the viewer relates to gender, sexuality, and the physical body in cyberspace. The program also includes a series of videos made for the pornography site RedTube, entitled Porn Interventions (2015), which are meant to “invoke pornographic tropes but defy porn viewer’s expectations” by presenting them with something “critical, strange, and not very sexy.”
The GIF reel includes, among others, Visual Orgasms (2015), a series of animated GIFs employing phallic symbols such as birds and bees, erupting volcanos, and launching rocket ships.
The program will run roughly 40 minutes.
general admission $7
students with ID $5
_
Faith Holland is an artist and curator whose practice focuses on gender and sexuality’s relationship to the Internet. She received her BA in Media Studies at Vassar College and her MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited at Elga Wimmer (New York), Axiom Gallery (Boston), the Philips Collection (Washington, D.C.), DAM Gallery (Berlin), and File Festival (São Paulo). Her work has been written about in Artforum, The Sunday Times UK, Elephant, ArtFCity, Hyperallergic, The Creator’s Project, and Dazed Digital. She was a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Finalist in Digital/Electronic Art. She had her first solo show at Transfer Gallery in 2015. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning and Harvestworks.
Program:
GIF reel, 2011-2016, looping
The GIF reel will include the projects Visual Orgasms and Dirty Blingees in addition to other assorted GIFs.
Artist’s Statement, 2011, 2:04 min
Artistʼs Statement is a commentary on the emptiness of the language often (but not always) used to describe art. Although the video is from the point-of-view of the artist, the problem of trying to verbally describe visual work extends to that of curators, critics, and the like.
Improving, Non-Stop, 2011, 11:38 min
Improving, Non-Stop is a science fiction short exploring contemporary magazine-culture beauty standards and the part they play in everyday life. Using myself as a subject, I did a thorough retouching of a self-portrait in Photoshop. This process is edited down to show certain salient moments in real time. The film then breaks into live action and I wear a mask of the retouched self-portrait. My face is transformed into a “perfect” version of myself, but the act of wearing a mask prevents normal activity and interaction. The result is darkly humorous and thoroughly uncomfortable.
RIP Geocities, from the series WWW3, 2011, 2:32 min
As though on a rollercoaster at an amusement park, RIP Geocities is a ride through what Hollywood envisioned as cyberspace in the 1990’s. Geocities, a website that hosted personal homepages for free, was a locus of creative Internet energy in the 1990’s. This video abstractly represents and mourns the loss of not only the Geocities website, but also the culture it engendered teeming with polyphonic, hand-coded web presences.
Analog Internet, from the series WWW3, 2012, 5:12 min
Analog Internet is a video-sculpture that reveals a pyramid of three-dimensional rendered CRT televisions, each with a different cat video appropriated from YouTube playing. This is the core of the Internet: an Egyptian site of worship for cats. Considering the Internet’s obsession with cats, Analog Internet re-imagines having the same relationship to cat videos in physical, not digital, space.
Screen Flicker, from the series WWW3, 2012, 1:40 min
Screen Flicker re-stages the flatness of the computer screen, in direct opposition to the tunnels of cyberspace. Screens naturally flicker, at a rate too quick for our eyes to perceive but one that can be captured by a camera. This video confuses the medium of the computer screen with that of film, employing the classic avant-garde film strategy of flicker.
Light Petting, 2013, 1:14 min
Heavy Petting, 2013, 1:59 min
Light Petting and Heavy Petting are a video couplet about our bodily relation to images we see on the screen. The videos suggest a different relationship to the virtual image, one that is both affective and physical. Heavy Petting, in particular, complicates the viewer’s relationship to pornographic images in multiple ways. There is an appropriation of heterosexual male-targeted porn for a female audience and rather than identify with the penis, the viewer relates with the woman’s actions. But this identification is incomplete and instead a triadic relationship is formed between the couple on screen and the viewer in meatspace.
Technolust WARNING, 2014, 2:03 min
Technolust WARNING is a found spam video that is obliquely advertising porn addiction assistance. The video is edited to suggest a technological component to this supposed ‘addiction.’
Shaving Cream on RedTube, from the series Porn Interventions, 2014, 3:20 min
Lick Suck Screen 2 on RedTube, from the series Porn Interventions, 2014, 1:19 min
Clit Cam on RedTube, 2014, from the series Porn Interventions, 1:18 min
For ASUGARHIGH on RedTube, from the series Porn Interventions, 2014, 2:50 min
Porn Interventions is a series of site-specific videos made for RedTube. The works invoke pornographic tropes but defy porn viewers’ expectations. The videos are uploaded to RedTube using the site’s own vernacular clickbait, with tags such as “solo girl,” “BBW,” “amateur,” etc. Instead of the free flow of sexualized bodies, porn surfers are confronted with something critical, strange, and not very sexy.
Still from “Improving, Non-Stop” (Faith Holland, 2011) – image courtesy of the artist
