versus Reality brings together a collection of video installations that depict the multiple perspectives of femininity. This exhibition illustrates these forms through 3D simulated figures and environments. These virtual spaces allow the artists to critique stereotypes about females constructed by media sources like the entertainment and gaming industries. versus Reality deconstructs this notion rather than redefining it.
Virtual spaces created by 3D programs allow the artists to critique female stereotypes embraced by the special-effects industries and 3D gaming, the dominant forms of computer graphics and virtual imaging in the mass media, which is a grand part of the contemporary visual culture. These industries are distinct, because they are usually homo-social and misogynistic, and they are mainly based on a number of hyper-masculinity paradigms, where the typical narratives include wars, car racing, and women as sexual objects.
This show includes the work of young women who are not only part of the first generation using these media in a contemporary art context, but also part of the first visual culture that allows women to create their own images, and who are able to drive a very different wedge to this uniform and conformist culture. This is a unique moment in history, where a medium that is not just new but has been almost exclusively gender based is opening up, and the young women artists in the show are invading a territory that they have been formerly excluded from.
The crying figure in Katie Torn’s Monument functions as a statue, which is framed by a camera that gazes upon the production of detritus fluids in a colorful landscape. The 3D water flows into Hiba Ali’s Untitled (grls) through the flattening of the figurative form, where not one but multiple images of constructed female identities are envisaged. While continuing the notion of the gaze, the viewer experiences the uncanny in Amanda VanVulkenberg’s piece Deer, where the animal figure is trapped at the end of the hall, proposing questions of power and struggle. Its eerie echoes can also be heard in Sanglim Han’s Primal Nest, an experimental 3D video game where the viewer is invited to play, zoom into the frame, and experience the virtual reality of a female womb. The aspect of “zooming in” is also an immanent part of Snow Yunxue Fu’s video installation Pro. The curved wall and the vertical frame function as guides as well as ways to grant the viewer’s entry into a liminal space between the real and the simulated metaphysical space, while engage the feminine aspects of her painterly aesthetic. This landscape in Darya Zorina’s Garden Party Ballet pans down into a singular vein of a glowing river. This piece depicts Darya’s embracement of the feminine stereotypes and the new meaning that it proposed as the camera travels over the fantastical landscape, and the viewer is engulfed in its all-encompassing spectacle.
Showcasing the works of six female artists, versus Reality expresses a range of positions, but at the same time reflects each artist’s knowledge that they are part of a generation that is staking a claim in what was formerly a homo-social visual culture. As a result each artist deals with issues of feminine identity, creating their unique feminine aesthetics, by sometimes being critical, sometimes even embracing the tropes as females, and bringing up important questions about what might be the space in between these ideas.
Virtual spaces created by 3D programs allow the artists to critique female stereotypes embraced by the special-effects industries and 3D gaming, the dominant forms of computer graphics and virtual imaging in the mass media, which is a grand part of the contemporary visual culture. These industries are distinct, because they are usually homo-social and misogynistic, and they are mainly based on a number of hyper-masculinity paradigms, where the typical narratives include wars, car racing, and women as sexual objects.
This show includes the work of young women who are not only part of the first generation using these media in a contemporary art context, but also part of the first visual culture that allows women to create their own images, and who are able to drive a very different wedge to this uniform and conformist culture. This is a unique moment in history, where a medium that is not just new but has been almost exclusively gender based is opening up, and the young women artists in the show are invading a territory that they have been formerly excluded from.
The crying figure in Katie Torn’s Monument functions as a statue, which is framed by a camera that gazes upon the production of detritus fluids in a colorful landscape. The 3D water flows into Hiba Ali’s Untitled (grls) through the flattening of the figurative form, where not one but multiple images of constructed female identities are envisaged. While continuing the notion of the gaze, the viewer experiences the uncanny in Amanda VanVulkenberg’s piece Deer, where the animal figure is trapped at the end of the hall, proposing questions of power and struggle. Its eerie echoes can also be heard in Sanglim Han’s Primal Nest, an experimental 3D video game where the viewer is invited to play, zoom into the frame, and experience the virtual reality of a female womb. The aspect of “zooming in” is also an immanent part of Snow Yunxue Fu’s video installation Pro. The curved wall and the vertical frame function as guides as well as ways to grant the viewer’s entry into a liminal space between the real and the simulated metaphysical space, while engage the feminine aspects of her painterly aesthetic. This landscape in Darya Zorina’s Garden Party Ballet pans down into a singular vein of a glowing river. This piece depicts Darya’s embracement of the feminine stereotypes and the new meaning that it proposed as the camera travels over the fantastical landscape, and the viewer is engulfed in its all-encompassing spectacle.
Showcasing the works of six female artists, versus Reality expresses a range of positions, but at the same time reflects each artist’s knowledge that they are part of a generation that is staking a claim in what was formerly a homo-social visual culture. As a result each artist deals with issues of feminine identity, creating their unique feminine aesthetics, by sometimes being critical, sometimes even embracing the tropes as females, and bringing up important questions about what might be the space in between these ideas.