LOS ANGELES — Invisibility: Powers & Perils at Oxy Arts at Occidental Faculty seems to be on the penalties of that which can’t be seen. Curator Yael Lipschutz brings in an eclectic vary of artists on this examination: a primary version of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and a two-channel video projection by Sondra Perry that take into account invisibility’s function on Black id; a cluster of works coping with expertise, together with encryption, knowledge, and deepfakes; and bespoke scents by Katie Paterson and taxidermied fowl specimens that confront the looming way forward for invisibility by way of extinction within the pure world.
Although every of those works is powerful, as a group, the present ping-pongs from one theme to a different, breaking apart a cohesive message. Based mostly on the gallery’s format, for example, the primary work a customer will probably encounter is Invisible Man, which is protected in a vitrine and mounted above a classic unfold from Life journal that pairs promotion of the e-book with haunting portraits and assemblages by famed photographer Gordon Parks. This means that the present may heart Blackness. But the remainder of the artworks on this first part flip towards topics as numerous as radiation, black holes, knowledge, and synthetic intelligence, none of which have been created by Black artists.
The work of the 2 Black artists within the 13-person present is housed within the bigger part of the gallery. Tavares Strachan’s “The Encyclopedia of Invisibility” (2018), a 2400-page tome devoted to intangible sensations and neglected histories, is poignantly displaying the entry for Palestine, and since the e-book is protected behind glass, nobody can erase its existence. Behind the e-book, in its personal nook, is Sondra Perry’s “Double Quadruple Negative Etcetera I & II” (2013), a two-channel video set up through which two dancers flail about, an AI-driven software rendering them a fast-changing patchwork of drywall. All that identifies them as Black is their hair texture and the occasional blurred brow, a uncommon occasion through which massive tech is used to guard fairly than exploit.
Tavares Strachan, “The Encyclopedia of Invisibility” (2018), leather-based, gilding, archival paper, maple, felt and acrylic
One other fascinating two-channel video that leverages AI is an excerpt from “Soft Evidence” (2021) by the artwork collective Operator (Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti), which reveals the identical lady in numerous settings. In a single channel, she’s studying a newspaper in an eerie drycleaning store. Within the different, the girl stares blankly on the display screen. “That’s not me,” she says in a monotone, seemingly referring to the truth that she doesn’t really exist: All the movie is kind of convincingly deepfaked.
Whereas such critiques on expertise dominate a lot of this exhibition, because it’s a part of the Getty PST: Artwork and Science Collide initiative, a couple of works confront the local weather disaster. In “To Burn, Forest, Fire” (2021), consisting of two bespoke incense sticks, one made with traces of liverwort, quartz sandstone, and ferns, Paterson calls consideration to endangered ecosystems by imagining the smells of the Cairo Forest, the world’s first forest, now a group of 385-million-year-old fossils in New York’s Hudson Valley. The opposite stick smells just like the mossy and endangered Amazon rainforest, warning us that it’d quickly undergo the identical destiny as its predecessor.
Invisibility looks like a brainstorming session, with nodes sprouting from a central theme. However I needed to see a thousand extra thought bubbles within the type of artworks tacked onto every idea to extra totally flesh it out. This present raises thrilling questions round racial, technological, and ecological invisibility, and leaves us asking for extra.
Set up view of Invisibility: Powers & Perils
Set up view of Operator (Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti), “Soft Evidence” (2021), two-channel video, deepfake algorithm, synthetic intelligence, typewriter
Invisibility: Powers & Perils, a part of Getty’s PST ART: Artwork & Science Collide initiative, continues at Oxy Arts at Occidental Faculty (4757 York Boulevard, Los Angeles) by February 22. The exhibition was curated by Yael Lipschutz.
