Opening Reception: Then They Form Us – Fall 2015 – Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara

Cécile B. Evans, Hyperlinks or it didn’t happen, 2014, HD video, 22 minutes, Courtesy the Artist

Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) presents Then they form us, a new group exhibition that explores the precarious status of the “self” during its pixelated or roboticized evolution—as computers increasingly co-opt the human body during an age of ultra-connectivity. The six artists in the exhibition create works that question the ways in which identities are altered within this digital realm. Participating artists includeXavier Cha (b. 1980, Los Angeles, CA); Constant Dullaart (b. 1979, Leiderdorp, NL); Cécile B. Evans (b. 1983, Cleveland, OH); Devin Kenny (b. 1987, Chicago, IL); Hayal Pozanti (b. 1983, Istanbul, TR); and Julien Prévieux (1974, Grenoble, FR).

This exhibition is organized by Brooke Kellaway, MCASB Associate Curator.

ADMISSION IS FREE FOR MEMBERS

Join us at 6 pm for a special performance lecture from featured artist Cécile B. Evans, titledFeeling For You.

Feeling For You is an ongoing, frequently updated performance lecture that reverse engineers the artist’s practice through a series of personal anecdotes, google searches, images, and video clips. Meandering through the last few years of Evans’ work, the talk follows the same ‘hyperlinked’ logic used in recent videos like Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen. Touching on the impacting rise of digital technology and the disorienting feedback loops it creates within society, this performance of Feeling For You takes the exhibition’s title as a starting point. Linking McLuhan’s idiom to a rumoured conversation with his priest Father John Culkin (in which it was Culkin who said ‘we shaped our tools, thereafter they shape us’), Evans takes the opportunity to question the last few years of her own work. The performance ends with an introduction to her ‘New Phase of Research’, which aims to spiral back out from this feedback loop, hoping to take the audience along. Duration: 20 minutes.

Opening Reception: Then They Form Us – Fall 2015

Share

MCASB