In the Cloud: Group Show
Ethan Cohen New York is pleased to present our summer 2015 group show IN THE CLOUD. The exhibition will run from June 25th to August 28th, 2015.
IN THE CLOUD invokes two definitions of "Cloud" which have converged in our time. The first comes down to us from the ancients, the idea of an invisible influence from above as expressed these days through process art. The second is an attempt to digest, through painting and new media, the technology-based 'Cloud' phenomenon. Where we once looked to the clouds to guide us, we now trust The Cloud with our personal mysteries: our memories, relationships, and virtual identity. Both are significant in our consciousness, requiring us to believe in the things that we cannot see. Your hands can't hold your data and your face won't meet the gods.
Ancient myths viewed clouds as divine symbols, imagining that the gods dictated one's choices. The equivalent in contemporary art practice means that the artist no longer dominates the work. Nature and gravity, a ghostly actuation, steer the materials in the artwork just as clouds and high beings steered our destiny. Down the ages, clouds as metaphysical beings came to serve as symbols of freedom; dreamy and whimsical states of mind. This dreamy whimsical cloud has now reincarnated technologically as a vast abyss of obscurity, a technological storage space of information whose control, use, and purpose is still dangerously unknown.
The artists featured in the show probe the Cloud's menacing omnipotence, its ineffable presence, our attempts to divine and iterate it. Greg Haberny's works display his materials within the frame as if to argue that they did it, they pushed him, they're the true authors. He shows us who 'they' are. The Franklin Collective's "Dreamliner" explores the zone where the physical and non-physical dispute reality, the digital no-man's-land, the notion that even a Boeing jet aspires to become a dream. Jake Cartwright's visual sound effects give us a tangible clue to what music would look like if it materialized before our eyes, the cloud made visible. Rafael Suarez documents the tracery of spaceflights on our globe, on our hidden consciousness, beyond our sensory range, vector-traces of ineffable beings. All of these works try to tell us what realities we impinge on, that impinge on us, and how we strain to decode them for our uses.
Featuring artworks by Hans Breder, Taha Heydari, Deshawn Dumas, Mollie McKinley, Greg Haberny, Buhua Liu, Eric Yevak, Noah Sokoloff, Jake Cartwright, Isaac Aden, Sylvia Feliz, Liliana Gao, Mark John Smith, Michael Patton, Matt Whitman, Jon Tsoi, Joseph Ayers, Vargas-Suarez Universal, Christopher Lin, Nikita Shoshensky and opening reception sound installation by Data Garden.