Built Environments: Forging Worlds through Video Art

Opening Reception: March 1

The moving image, with its similitude to our day-to-day lived experience, is unique in its ability to imply the completeness of the world imagined by artists. The artists in this exhibition, through coding, animation, and storytelling, have built through-the-looking-glass worlds reflecting ours, but entirely their own. Video is the perfect medium for such parallels, as we are now flooded with moving pictures. It is how we learn, work, communicate, and entertain ourselves. We are primed for its immersive effects and the implied truth value inherent in seeing er go believing. These artists construct entire universes within the confines of a screen holding within them powerful and important truths of our current world told through this complex and efficacious medium.

Image: Successive Divisions John McGarity

About the Artists

elekhlekha is a collaborative research-based group consisting of Bangkok-born, Brooklyn-based artists Kengchakaj and Nitcha. We are interested in subversive storytelling using non-dominance sound and visual archives, historical research–decoding and unlearning biases, performing documents, multimedia, and technology to experiment, explore, and define decolonized possibilities. elekhlekha is a Thai word that means dispersedly, chaos, unorganized, all over, and non-direction. Jitr is a performative audio-visual that utilizes historical research and live coding tools to reconcile Southeast Asia’s shared heritage.

Nitcha Tothong (fame) is an interdisciplinary artist and designer who uses narrative and humanizing storytelling, sensory experience, and emotional expression through art and technology.

Kengchakaj is an award-winning pianist, improviser, composer, and electronic experimentalist. His musical idiom is rooted in the improvised aesthetics of Southeast Asia cultures and American music.

Tansy Xiao is an artist, curator, and writer based in New York. Xiao creates theatrical installations with non-linear narratives that often extend beyond the fourth wall. Her work examines the power and inadequacy of language and, furthermore, substantiates the multiplicity of being human through the assemblage of stochastic audio and recontextualized objects. Xiao is a recent recipient of the Wave Farm MAAF Grant and the Brooklyn Arts Fund. Her work has been presented at the Queens Museum, New Media Caucus, Piksel Festival, The American Society for Theatre Research Conference, Osaka University of Art, The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, New Adventures in Sound Art, Pelham Art Center, The Immigrant Artist Biennial, Azarian McCullough Art Gallery among others. Xiao is currently an artist in residence at Harvestworks.

John McGarity is an interdisciplinary artist exploring themes of identity, memory, and human experience through painting, multi-media installations, video, and artifacts. His work is influenced by folklore and mythology, and he is particularly interested in local and regional perspectives. He uses visual iconography, pictorial representation, and symbology to create a narrative that reflects the politics of spirituality and the search for divine wisdom. In his work, he examines the common threads of parables and fables and the role of the protagonist in transforming knowledge into wisdom. His art is characterized by ambiguity and murkiness, reflecting the discomfort felt when presented with new or strange customs and cultural ceremonies. An ongoing body of work, “Order of the Old Line,” acts as an umbrella concept for his creative research.

About the Curator

Miranda K. Metcalf has a master’s degree in art history with a focus on printmaking from the University of Arizona. For the past decade, she has worked in the arts in Australia, Thailand, and the United States in both commercial and non-profit institutions. She is currently the director of the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University in Alfred, NY.

The Institute for Electronic Art

All artists are previous residents of the The Institute for Electronic Arts, a high technology research studio facility within the School of Art and Design, NYSCC, Alfred University, New York. The IEA encourages and supports projects that involve interactive multi-media systems, experimental sonic/video production, digital imaging, and publications. The IEA is committed to developing cultural interactions spurred by technological experimentation and artistic investigations.