Transfer Gallery

Carla Gannis @ TRANSFER, Jan 23 – Mar 12

22 January 2016

Carla Gannis‘s solo exhibition A Subject Self-Defined is on New York’s TRANSFER, opening January 23 and running to March 12.

The NYC-based artist addresses “issues of branded identity; age and body estimation; catastrophe culture; and online agency via static, dynamic and interactive “selfie” imagery”, through self-portraiture  inspired by women artists who turn the camera away from the male gaze and onto their own image.

Presenting work across media, the exhibition utilises a range of technologies including drawing, painting, animation, social media and augmented reality to interrogate Gannis’ perplexed interest in “subjecthood and self-definition in relationship to the ‘personal’ when performed publicly.”

Ed’s note: the exhibition opening date has been changed to January 30. 

See the TRANSFER gallery website for details.**

Carla Gannis, Part of 15 Folds “SEX” Thread: “Autoeroticomplete”. Courtesy the artist
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The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale, Nov 1 – Jan 31

29 October 2015

The second edition of The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale is running on the “internet + IRL embassies around the world”, from November 1 to January 31, 2016.

The largest and most comprehensive digital art biennale brings 60 online pavilions and forty IRL embassies around the world (from Transfer in Brooklyn to The Drake Hotel in Toronto to Arebyte Gallery in London) with over 90 contributing curators and 1,000+ contributing artists, including curators Rea McNamaraLucie Kåss and David Quiles Guilló 

Before the official opening on November 1 comes Uncurated, The Wrong’s Mexico City pavilion and the embassy of the biennale. The physical “heardquarter” focuses on the creation of a speculative virtual environment and the transformations in the approach to curation that requires.

See the official The Wrong website for details. **

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An interview with Faith Holland

17 June 2015

Drawing from gender issues, the variety of ways in which people engage their sexuality using technology, and in an attempt to redefine the heteronormative standard narrative often found in porn, artist Faith Holland has spent the past few months collecting and selecting cum shots that have been submitted to her by a wide range of online users for her new project ‘Ookie Canvases’. The resulting work has recently debuted in her first solo exhibition, Technophillia, which opened June 13, 2015 at Transfer Gallery. Holland is wholly dedicated to redefining the status quo depictions of the orgasm and of pornographic content at large. As an active feminist with a pro-pornography attitude, she uses her work in hopes to provoke thoughts that question the state of porn today. Holland often inserts herself into the very industry she’s critiquing by using RedTube as her medium to create interventions that disrupt and hopefully pose such questions to its unsuspecting viewers.

Animated GIF from ‘Visual Orgasms’ (2015) by Faith Holland. Image courtesy artist.

While sex is very much at the forefront of Holland’s work, rarely is it explicit. With Holland’s lo-fi net aesthetic series of GIFs entitled ‘Visual Orgasms’, she uses visual metaphors for orgasms such as trains speeding through tunnels, cascading waterfalls, or fireworks and manages to convey and arouse sexuality in the viewer while rendering it genderless. The imagery becomes transgressive for retaining its eroticism amidst a complete lack of bodies. It’s these subtleties that make her work deft as she treks through the swampy world of sexual politics and the cis-white-male hegemony with great skill. Holland is not at all careless with her research or her views. She very carefully considers inclusivity, fluidity, and does not exploit her subject matter, which is rather difficult to do when talking about sexuality or sex work in art.

Technophilia is a vision of the web that thrives with egalitarian pornographic content and a truer representation of sex in the sex industry—representation of all bodies across all spectrums, and of the elusive female orgasm. It is an ode to the intimacy and mediation that is offered by the screen, and how that shapes our sexuality and allows the other to become more visible and defetishized. It is a love letter to invisible bodies everywhere through a cascade of heavily lubed up ethernet cables ready to transmit these signals.

I met Faith on Google Chat to talk about her experience collecting cum shots online, her thoughts on the porn industry, female orgasms, and Technophilia, and her forthcoming visual mixtape GIFs to Have Sex By.

ookie canvas-flat-mag
‘Ookie Canvas I’ (2015) by Faith Holland. Image courtesy artist.

I’m curious, how many submissions have you gone through for ‘Ookie Canvas’? And what was the experience of going through images of people’s cum shots like?

Faith Holland: I think I got around 50-60 responses from a variety of sources. I set up an email account just for the project and also an anonymous dropbox but people ended up reaching out to me through my regular email, an email from a different project, through Facebook, etc. It was quite disordered, but in general pretty fun. I’ve put together some of my favorite emails into a small zine—some were quite incredible, like here’s a dick pic, an artist statement, and some work or here’s a video I made for a woman who aborted the fetus I wanted to have with her. The people that responded were often very interested in the project and gave me quite a bit; I was grateful.

Wow. That sounds like a really beautiful yet quirky experience. Some people treated their cum shot more personally or intimately than others. It’s almost like a small survey that reveals the different ways in which people relate to their bodies or orgasms.

FH: Yes, one person actually seemed to scan images from a personal archive—that felt really special and generous. But there was also an interesting sense of ownership; many asked when they would be able to see their cum on display.

Animated GIF from ‘Visual Orgasms’ (2015) by Faith Holland. Image courtesy artist.

I suppose in the end it’s the same as with any artwork, with regards to ownership.

FH: I guess so! I’m trying to credit everyone for their contribution, but I set out specific guidelines for that which most people ignored.

Which guidelines were mostly ignored?

FH: Well it was very open, but I did ask people to rename their files if they wanted to be credited with whatever name or handle they’d like to use. Particularly for things I received via email, that was ignored. But I promised anonymity of email addresses and names associated with those addresses, so to me that’s the more important part of the bargain. I also received one photo which is just a man standing in a field. That was a kind of lovely misunderstanding.

How many ‘Ookie Canvas’ abstractions will you be showing for Technophilia?

FH: Two—the first one, which is sourced from RedTube, my porn home where I also upload videos and the Sub/emissions canvas. I’ll continue with the series, but these are the first two.

Matrice
‘Matrice’ (2015) by Faith Holland. Image courtesy artist.

Can you talk about your show a bit?

FH: Yes of course! So the show will include the ‘Ookie Canvases’, the ‘Visual Orgasms’ series of GIFs ,which I’ve added to with four new pieces, a sexy photo of wires drenched in lube which also serves as the centerfold for a catalog with essays by Nora O’ Murchú and Seth Watter, and two wire sculptures. One wire sculpture, called ‘Matrice’, is a recreation of an image I’ve used in my work before from a film called Sexual Matrix. It’s a tromp l’oeil piece that looks like space is receding more dramatically than it actually is. The other is a kind of wire altarpiece with 60 ethernet wall jacks all plugged in with wires cascading to the floor and dripping with lubricant. I’ve also made a soundtrack for the show that mixes computer whirs and sexual moans.

I am imagining a shrine for orgasms and the internet. What draws you to making work about the orgasm?

FH: Yes I love that description! I’m drawn to the orgasm because it’s unrepresentable visually and unreliable aurally, so visual media has often tried to overcompensate for that lack with cum shots. That was the initial idea for ‘Visual Orgasms’; cataloging and poking fun at the ways Hollywood represented sexual pleasure under the Hays Code, a censorship act in effect from approximately the 1930s to the 1960s. This is the same struggle that the pornography industry faces and they choose to deal with it through external cum shots, but of course that only represents male pleasure. The ‘Ookie Canvases’ came directly out of that inquiry into cum shots and the privileging of male pleasure that they necessarily indicate.

Animated GIF from ‘Visual Orgasms’ (2015) by Faith Holland. Image courtesy artist.

Yes the female orgasm has had a sad history. Men have gone great lengths to suppress the female libido. It took so long to even give it a proper name. I feel like your ‘Visual Orgasms’ give the female orgasm visibility and funnily enough by using the same visual imagery used in the past to censor them. ‘Visual Orgasms’ feel wholly feminine to me, they don’t make me think of male orgasms at all.

FH: I think oddly, even though they grew out of this thinking about male orgasms, they actually manage to represent both. I haven’t experienced both, but they are the same phenomenon—to orgasm is human. And maybe dolphin too?

Yes maybe I’m just biased because I only know my own experience but I suppose if a man saw one of your GIFS they’d probably associate it with their own experiences of pleasure too.

FH: I’ve gotten mixed responses. They’re representing something abstract, so I think it’s very easy to adapt to one’s own experience in a way that a literal cum shot cannot be adapted.

Good point. I’d like to talk a little about porn with you. Have your views on porn changed over the years after researching it for so long? I realize I don’t know exactly what your views on porn are. Could you also talk a little bit about that too?

FH: My relationship to porn is always evolving, particularly since I’ve been looking at SO MUCH for these projects. I’ve never been anti-pornography, and for me that’s a really important factor to consider in relation to my work. But I do find faults in pornography—its homogeneity, its production that targets heterosexual male audiences, its privileging of thin white cis-women’s bodies and the fetishization of all other bodies. So I try to make interventions into some of these problems through my work to open up a dialogue about porn’s biases and the potential for better porn. It’s meant as a loving critique.

Animated GIF from ‘Visual Orgasms’ (2015) by Faith Holland. Image courtesy artist.

You seem like a very beautiful person. I hope one day the porn industry changes in its treatment of sex workers and in the content that it produces. Trying to open up a dialogue is important to help make that happen so I really value your work and thoughts on the matter. So after you’ve finished installing, what’s next?

FH: The show also has a closing event called GIFs to Have Sex By with over 40 artists invited to make GIFs to form a visual mixtape you’d want in the background while having sex. So that’s the next immediate project and I’m really excited to see what people come up with; I’ve gotten some pretty fantastic things so far. After that, back to work! I want to make more ‘Porn Intervention’ videos for RedTube, I’ll continue working with ‘Ookies’ in a new project for The Wrong, and I have some more sculptural ideas I want to pursue. I’m bad at taking breaks.

Wonderful. Will the visual mixtape be available to download?

FH: The closing is July 11th, so it’ll debut at Transfer Gallery and then have a digital afterlife that I haven’t fully worked out. But it’s coming to a bedroom near you soon! **

Technophilia runs June 13, 2015 through July 11, 2015 at Transfer Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.

Header image: ‘It Needs You’ (2015) by Faith Holland. Image courtesy artist.

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Rollin Leonard @ Transfer Gallery, May 2 – 23

1 May 2015

Transfer Gallery is bringing in New Portraiture this weekend, the gallery’s second solo exhibition by Rollin Leonard, in a new partnership with XPO Gallery and Cloaque.org, running at the Brooklyn space from May 2 to May 23.

The photographic, semi-sculptural objects in the New Portraiture collection are the result of Leonard’s extensive new series of work that will span three exhibition spaces. Opening physically at Transfer on May 2, the collection will then exhibit digitally at Cloaque.org on May 20, and, after wrapping up at Transfer on May 23, the physical collection will move on to Paris’s XPO Gallery on May 28.

Continuing his exploration of the human body’s “digital afterlife”, Leonard’s photographed subjects are flattened by uniform lighting and an all-focus depth of field, algorithmically disjoined and dislimbed into abstract and yet still recognizably humanoid shapes.

See the Transfer Gallery exhibition page for details. **

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Marisa Olson @ Transfer Gallery, Dec 15 – Jan 10

16 December 2014

Transfer Gallery is bringing Getting Ready, a solo exhibition and performance project by Marisa Olson, to its Brooklyn space from December 15 to January 10.

The artist, writer, and media theorist (and former Rhizome editor and curator) continues her interdisciplinary methodology with Getting Ready – which invokes “the anxiety of preparation for public engagement and exploring the degrees to which online participation soothes or exacerbates social alienation” – and touches on themes that have become staples in her work, like the politics of participation, gender theory, and the cultural history of technology.

Unlike most exhibitions, the performance-based project begins with no opening reception. In fact, Olson will spend the duration of the exhibition holed up in the gallery, opening the doors to the public only for a live performance and closing party on the show’s last day, enacting her performances through a web-based collaboration with NewHive multimedia publishing platform instead.

See the Transfer Gallery exhibition page for details. **

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Art Basel Miami Beach, Dec 4 – 7

2 December 2014

Art Basel is returning to Miami Beach this week for its annual stint, running at venues throughout the city from December 4 to December 7.

Art Basel Miami Beach continues its glitzy run this year promising over 250 international galleries from over 30 countries bringing more than 4,000 artists, including the US’s Clement Valla, Rollin Leonard, Kate Durbin, Mattie Hillock and Philip David Stearns, as well as France’s Pierre Clement, Vincent Broquaire, and Estrid Lutz + Emile Mold.

And running for the week of Art Basel is @hypersalon, a “meeting point for contemporary art” created by Transfer Gallery and XPO Gallery in partnership with Hyperallergic. The week of salon-style exhibitions, hosted conversations and daily artist talks include some names all too familiar to aqnb, including Daniel Temkin, as well as Carla Gannis and Claudia Hart who recently showed at the Coded After Lovelace exhibition, Spanish artist Claudia Mate, Marisa Olson of Art Post-Internet, and artist Alma Alloro.

See the Art Basel Miami Beach website for details. **

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Phillip David Stearns @ Transfer Gallery, Nov 15 – Dec 13

13 November 2014

Transfer Gallery will be putting on a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Phillip David Stearns, titled EVIDENT MATERIAL and running from November 15 to December 13.

Stearns’s exhibition takes an usual turn in terms of material, with a series of film-based images derived without a camera. With the help of various household chemicals and 15,000 volts of alternating current applied directly to the film, Stearns has created abstracted images showing arcs that swell across the surface, created by burning holes and igniting the film.

EVIDENT MATERIAL pushes further in what has become Stearns’s method of “challenging the ontology of post-digital photography using extended techniques—bending, cracking and breaking the medium”, as the press release for the exhibition states.

Alongside the press release is a short statement by the artist and his intent:

The sentiment that the camera is an extension of the eye is taken to an extreme. When looking through the Fujifilm FP-100c instant color film datasheets, the similarities between the layering of materials in the film and the layering of cells in the retinal is striking. Perhaps it is because the development of such film technologies parallels an evolving understanding of how the eye sees.

See the exhibition page for details. **

HVIM

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Kate Durbin @ Transfer Gallery, Oct 10 – 11

7 October 2014

Transfer Gallery is hosting a second iteration of Kate Durbin‘s HELLO, SELFIE! performance piece at NYC’s Union Square on October 10.

The “passive-aggressive” performance both mocks and iconises the consumer gaze of teen-girldom, inspired by the culture of surveillance today’s teens are growing up with, as well as everything from Hello Kitty and Apple products to Miley Cyrus tongue lashing.

The public performance consists of a group of woman performers crowding into Union Square to take selfies for an hour straight, something not un-heard of within the privacies of bedrooms and luxe bathrooms, all to be uploaded and shared in real time.

Following the performance is a reception with the artist and performers at the Brooklyn gallery space that evening, as well as a one-day exhibition of the selfies taken on October 11 at Transfer.

See the HELLO, SELFIE! exhibition page for details. **

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Language and Code @ Transfer Gallery, Aug 9 – Sep 1

8 August 2014

Transfer Gallery will be hosting Language and Code, a new collaborative exhibition between Daniel Temkin and A. Bill Miller, at their Brooklyn space from August 9 to September 1. 

The works of both artists consistently explore language patterns and the “new semantics [that] emerge in conversation with out post-digital era”, creating alternative aesthetics out of their interactions with both human- and machine-made language systems. 

In his gridCycles series, Miller’s suite of browser-based and printed works, a speculative visual text system is sampled from the series’ narrative field and generated as a holistic environment that contemplates both the individual and the whole, both the system and its parts.

Similarly, in Temkin’s work titled Light Pattern, a programming language that uses photos in place of text for source code, the artist attempts to communicate with the computer machine by producing images according to its specifications, producing “moments of affect which come naturally to human communication, even when actively discouraged”. 

See the Transfer Gallery exhibition page for details. **

LightPatternMachine-600x400

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Claudia Maté @ Transfer Gallery, Jul 12 – Aug 2

11 July 2014

Transfer Gallery presents Sweet Finances!, the latest exhibition from Claudia Maté, to run at their Brooklyn space from July 12 to August 2.

This is the first solo exhibition from the Spanish-born and London-based artist, who, out of the data leveraged by Yahoo! Finances API and collected by her through a series of web applications, has created a landscape unrelated and meaningless in its beauty, comprised of web-based applications, installations and sculptures.

And should you find yourself wanting your stock market shares enshrined in a printed artwork produced by the artist, Sweet Finances! is the place to get it.

See the Transfer Gallery exhibition page for details. **

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Moving Image New York, Mar 6 – 9

6 March 2014

The New York edition of Moving Image is on at the Waterfront New York Tunnel in Chelsea, running from March 6 to 9.

Things to check out include videos by Lorna Mills and Rollin Leonard from TRANSFER gallery, Daniel Canogar from Bitforms in New York, Liisa Lounila of AV-aarki in Finland and Vincent Broquaire from XPO gallery in Paris.

Plus there’s a world premiere by DataSpaceTime from Microscope Gallery and a screening of video art pioneer Nam Jun Paik‘s ‘Dog’.

See the Moving Image New York website for details. **

Header image: Moving Image New York 2013. © Etienne Frossard

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Anthony Antonellis @ TRANSFER Gallery, Mar 8 – 29

3 March 2014

Anthony Antonellis is presenting his first US solo exhibition Internet of my dreams at New York’s TRANSFER gallery, opening March 8 and running to March 29.

Exploring collapsed dichotomies across, digital and physical space, subconscious and conscious, sleep and awakened states, Antonellis produces a series of paintings and moving images from brainwave recordings of spatial experience within a dream using an EEG neuroheadset.

Drawing out the dreamscape and making it manifest, while presenting it in the public exhibition sphere, the work echoes the pervasive nature of online culture and its intrusion in to and extrusion of the private realm. After all, what could be more private than your dreams?

Read an overview of Antonellis’ work and see the TRANSFER website for details. **

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Alma Alloro @ Transfer Gallery, Jan 4 – 25

29 December 2013

Berlin-based artist Alma Alloro will be presenting a solo exhibition Apophenia at Brooklyn’s Transfer Gallery, running from January 4 to 25, 2014.

Inspired by what in the video below is called an LTV (lowtekvision) -a device used to help the vision-impaired with viewing printed matter -the show presents hand drawings and animations exploring the imperfections of the human hand, its aesthetic effects and how it can be integrated with digital technology. Aphophenia itself is named after the experience of “seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data”, so expect a critical look at the aformentioned subject, while the fact that LTV also happens to stand for the “lifetime value” of a customer in marketing could lend itself to the following Alloro quote:

In its afterlife, the device exposes a ubiquitous short sightedness, rendering users of every generation blind to other potential (mis)uses of technology.”

The exhibition will also include a publication featuring an essay by Daniel Rourke.

See the Transfer Gallery website for details. **

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String Literal @ TRANSFER Gallery, Sep 20

17 September 2013

Artist Carla Gannis and poet Justin Petropoulos of <legend></legend> orchestrate two artist/ writer collaborations,  String Literal, over two dates at Brooklyn’s TRANSFER Gallery. Following up Anthony Antonellis + Anthony Tognazzini’s ‘Closer.mp4‘ last week, ‘Chelsea Manning’s Pussy’ celebrates women in computing. Having already wowed us with her own Credit Card Curation number porn recently, artist Faith Holland joins forces with Sarah Jane Stoner in recognising Manning in her achievements in dropping a database of the US government’s ‘third world’ exploitations at the expense of her freedom and coming out as a woman the day after being sentenced to 35 years in prison for the deed.

Adding to the list of unheralded women documented in Sadie Plant’s Zeros + Ones, Holland and Stoner celebrate Manning’s role with the exhibition on Friday, September 20, as well as the opportunity for attendees to write, draw or create something to be sent to Manning at the United States Disciplinary Barracks in Kansas.

See the TRANSFER events page for more details. **

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