Curator

April 23 - May 16, 2015

Buffalo, New York

University at Buffalo, Dept. of Art Lower Gallery

Artists exhibited: Lynn Hershman Leeson, Clement Valla, Jillian Mayer, A Two Dogs Company, Future Death Toll, Byron Rich, Flatsitter, Layne Hinton, Church of Google, Megan Conley, Gerald Mead, Todd Smith, Chloe Higginbotham + Sean Feiner, 

Programming included a presentation by Jennifer Parker-Starbuck followed by a graduate workshop. 

 

Curatorial Statement:

 

“Ideas of mappings, blendings, transversal exchanges, figurations, and cyborgs have so seeped into culture and society that there is no going back. 

The body continues to fascinate, but what body is it?” 

- Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theater

 

Phantom Vibrations is a liminal space, meant for examining the intermittent moments when the body and technology intersect, diverge, and blend. The artwork in this exhibition challenges the relationship between the materiality of both the body and technology – investigating their kinship in an increasingly digital era. 

 

It is clear; we are no longer divided – no longer two distinct entities – as the artists in this exhibition open up possibilities for a bodily materiality that does not solely reside in our corporeal form. Bodies are changing, merging technology into the very fabric of their existence. How are we to understand the body if its materiality can also exists outside of our corporeal form? Technology is not simply enhancing the way we communicate with each other; it is drastically shifting the way we perceive our material substantiation. 

 

This exhibition brings together the work of artists thinking through this blurring of space between the body and technology. From Clement Valla’s work that exposes the “singular” geographic spaces of Google Earth, proving their actual composite nature, to the interactive work of Future Death Toll, who alters communication technology such as Google Hangout, turning it into a performative space, to the haunting prints of Layne Hinton, which capture the bodily grease traces left on cell phone screens.

 

The artists in Phantom Vibrations provide a space to examine, revel, and contemplate our changing understanding of the material body and its relationship to technology. In this space of uncertainty the only thing we can be sure of is Jennifer Parker-Starbuck’s assertion in the quote above, “there is no going back.”