Office Space

marginalia

March 6, 2022 - May 31, 2022

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Office Space is joyful to present a virtual group exhibition of four artists Patrick Winfield Vogel, Sumire Skye Taniai, Chunbum Park, and Melissa Prosser including a curated selection of digital and ready-to-print works as a gallery fundraiser for helping out Ukrainians in need. In four different series, various approaches to how the digital and ontological spaces elide with the visual language and cultural vocabulary of each artist are displayed on a webpage as well as an implicit physical space. Even though digital art has existed in some form since the 1960’s, artists such as Jeremy Blake, Carl Fudge, and arguably Michel Majerus who all work within that medium or its variant have used and circumvented their extant technologies to fit their particular hybrid of vision. In our group show, an examination of digital art within the era of the non-fungible token (NFT) becomes a reflective examination of how much our analog and digital realities have collided within a new world built on post-truth and speculative fictions.

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Within Patrick Winfield Vogel’s provocative performance-based photographs interrupted by the marks of the draftsman, the themes of post-human bodies and exploratory movement become evident within the concept of a public space which is created inherently by open possibilities of performativity. The human and animal bodies against the industrial concrete, both the material itself and the anti-abstraction, become a playground for how our visceral senses engage with the environment. The artist suggests that post-humans and non-humans can afford new paths in artistry beyond those derived from the Western canon of art history. Vogel’s other seemingly unrelated digital image entitled “DDT Disney” explores the merged spaces of an ecohorror landscape as crafted with artificial intelligence, a computational result of a human mind merged with the machine mind. The eerie memory of capitalist desire within Disney iconography are drowned within the harsh future of chemical drowning via poisonous DDT which was used extensively in the United States from the end of World War II until the mid-1970’s. Thus the parallel trends between how the theme park of the false American dream collude with the growth of the military industrial complex during the Vietnam War become more striking within Vogel’s inception of nationalist ecohorror caught within repeated history of visual imperialism.

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Sumire Skye Taniai, within her extensive digital series emulating a brilliant amalgam of pop art and 1980’s retrofuturism, cracks open various mythologies about both her Japanese feminist heritage and the digital anime/video game culture embedded within the Asian matrix. New forms involving very pixelated fragments of bodies and consumer products such as the logo for Liberty Mutual bump into the artist’s playful cartoons of her self-portrait in multiple moods. Within these permutations of post-capitalist trash heaps of leftover images ranging from agricultural products such as green bell peppers to corporate logos like the Shell icon to the ghost of Asian heroes such as Bruce Lee, the artist’s invocation of a lifestyle that swims between the arcade version of Mortal Kombat to the mad Farmville world of cats and cows demonstrates how much we cannot avoid relationship with our digital avatars and a mirror world referencing the virtual framing our physical selves and its environs. The incredible gamut of moods from infuriation against AAPI hate against female bodies as a form of post-colonial resistance to purely fanciful, whimsical laughter about the artist being in love or stuck in her digital selves becomes indelible proof that digital art need not to be so clinical and foreboding. Anne Anlin Chang mentions that “We know by now that Asiatic femininity in the Western racial imagination has never needed the biological or the natural to achieve a full, sensorial, agile, and vivid presence. Asiatic femininity has always been prosthetic. The dream of the yellow woman subsumes a dream about the inorganic. She is an, if not the, original cyborg.” Perhaps Taniai is our most delightful cyborg built from random cultural imprints like a counterpart of Ali Wong with her trangressive stand-up comedy routines.

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Chunbum Park’s exploration of self-identity as a transgender male body and bodies tie beautifully as a parallel to Taniai’s digital avatars. Combining skillful draftsmanship within a Korean sensibility of elegance and erotic tension, the artist destroys any boundaries between the male and female within her questioning delineation of Asian bodies caught in multiple colors rather than the stereotypical yellow and brown hues as represented in popular culture such as manga and anime. Often the lines are thin and spindly or thick and architectural; here the figurative and abstract worlds are designed to mirror the Korean equivalent of the floating world which is the liminal space of the virtual and real, the 17th century concept from the Edo period, as transplanted into our false dichotomy between the analog and digital. Similar to Vogel’s works, the appearance of the horse and tiger within a piece such as “Abstract Painting 04” as post-human voyeurs interacting with human or cyborg sexuality suggests a new world where traditional and capitalist judgments about gender identity and freeform sexual expression are suspended permanently. That the digital metaverse can be so forthrightly sexual and possibly pornographic becomes a jumping point for how a visual feast for the senses can engage with both nature and architecture simultaneously.

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Finally, the digital works from the studio of Melissa Prosser reflect a sociological and personal analysis of the artist’s experiences from her Southern childhood and ownership of a small farm near Logan, Utah. The dream-like variety ranging from the video game inspired figurative approaches within “Bird Flying with a Cloud Princess” to the purely abstract approach within “In a Fog” demonstrate how the artist is able to capture deftly her sharp eye for daily observation of small events such as growing chickens or private dreams of exotic scenes such as the deep sea with jellyfishes. Prosser’s ability to play around with digital patterns such as the pink honeycomb within “Spoonbillflower” become illustrations of the contrast between figure and ground contrast beautifully with a more semi-abstracted exploration of line and color within “Y8S,” a compendium of random imagery ranging from ghosts to an exotic bird. The lack of predictability amongst all of the artist’s works is rather impressive as the themes of the biological and the diurnal weave in and out of each piece.

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For this group show, each work is in an open edition of archival Epson inkjet prints to be sold in our physical gallery and in our online store on Artfare. Twenty percent of the gallery’s profits will be donated to various non-profit causes to support Ukrainian families and children in need. Office Space looks forward to being active in promoting world peace in democratic frameworks and fighting injustice. We also would like to thank our artists in this show for their support for the gallery’s social activism and involvement in a more open contemporary art world.

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Patrick Winfield Vogel is a sculptor and performer in the ongoing science fiction story termed North America. His practice asks what comes after our current age of environmental destruction, racism, sexism, speciesism and schismatic politics. He is currently researching post-capitalism and the desire called utopia as potent responses to the troubling Anthropocene era. After receiving his BFA at Oregon Center for the Arts, he is pursuing an MFA in Art & Technology at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA.

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Sumire Skye Taniai was born in Yamaguchi Prefecture in Japan, and has been living in the states for 18 years. She received her BFA in painting from University of Missouri in 2016 and received an MFA with a full merit scholarship from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019.

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Since then, she has curated a group show in her hometown in Japan, had group shows at Elmhurst Art Museum, Research House for Asian Art, Chicago, IL, Parlour and Ramp Gallery, Chicago, IL, Asian Students and Young Artists Art Festival in Seoul, South Korea, and recently accepted into the Flat Files Program 2020-21 at Collar Works located in Troy, NY. She is also a monthly contributor for ADF Magazine based in Tokyo, covering emerging artists in Chicago and Kansas City.

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Chunbum Park, also known as Chun, is a contemporary South Korean painter. She experiments with a wide variety of styles, including figuration, figurative abstraction with impasto, and pointillist “LEGO” style paintings. Her work focuses on the female figure, dealing with themes such as the sexualized imagery of femininity and the hybrid nature of the male gaze involving performativity and mimetic fantasy. Born in 1991, Park went to the School of Visual Arts for his BFA in Fine Arts and is currently attending the MFA Fine Arts Studio program at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her works have been featured in the online Fresh Faces exhibition at the Abigail Ogilvy gallery in Boston and The SHIM/Bachelors Show on Artsy.net. She lives and paints in New Jersey.

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Melissa Prosser is a largely self-taught digital artist based out of Logan, Utah. She runs a farm and is originally from Alabama; she is also a member of the Office Space Collective.