DALL’ANIMA (of the soul)

EXHIBITION / Catalog text by sam light

The soul exists within, yet has the unique ability to surround, defining the core essence of a being, space, or idea. To extend oneself, one must seek to extend one's reality, exploring uncharted worlds with infinite creative outcomes.

Carrie Able is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist, whose work reimagines the familiar, creative disciplines of oil painting and sculpture through the use and intersection of Extended Reality (XR) and Decentralized Blockchain Technologies, building new worlds for audiences to immerse themselves within.

An early innovator of the Metaverse, Able has asked and answered questions about how a digitally native, creative practice functions, while honoring her initial passions for oil painting, sculpture, and poetry. Incorporating XR into her fine art practice since 2017, Able has built a space where the soul of her creativity can exponentially evolve through the use of Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality (AR, VR, MR).

Breaking down barriers by questioning how “fine art” can be produced, viewed, and collected, Able links the seemingly disparate communities of art and tech enthusiasts. With the XR space yet to be fully represented on a fine art stage, the background of Personal Structures informs global audiences in homes, classrooms, galleries, and private collections about how immersive art can increase accessibility and cross-cultural communication.

The visual components of this exhibition include the premier of 8 large-scale oil paintings, which act as AR-markers. Through the use of a custom app, smartphone cameras allow for 2D figures dispersed within vast color fields to leap into 3D floating forms. Suspended above these works, floats a collection of repeated volumetric 3D printed sculptures, which Able forms in mid-air while wearing a VR headset. The same headset is available within the gallery space for viewers to experience a fully immersive

digital painting, created in VR, displayed as NFTs. The collection of digital paintings becomes unique virtual worlds, minted for collection on a decentralized blockchain, to be distributed into Web3 environments.

Connecting Able's fine art practice with her career as a musician, a life-size holographic display shifts between live-streaming and pre-recorded choreographed performances, launching the drop of Able's new visual music album. The hologram installed for the duration of the exhibition references the live performance done by Able on the opening night of the Biennale.

A working artist from the age of 14, Able notes, "I create art as a daily physiological necessity, and wish for my work to bring joy, comfort, and hope to others as it does for me." Pioneering the use of XR, the soul of Able's work continually explores new environments and identities, undergoing infinite stages of evolution.

Surface scope

EXHIBITION text by sam light

Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, each work presented is seen from the uppermost layer, in essence, the surface, presented for a viewer to consume at a multitude of angles. With this consideration, the seemingly disparate works are linked, as each artist encompasses the full scope of their medium, engaging with the full extent of the subject area to the point of breaking boundaries. 

Exploring identity, artists ask; what does it mean to be an artist? For some, an understanding of beauty through nature vs. nurture oscillates between real and imagined spaces for subjects to inhabit. Embracing form through “effort objects” others seek happiness in the physicality of creating visual works of art. When do everyday objects feel like art? When do they go almost unnoticed? 

Augmented Reality-Enabled oil paintings hold space for traditional practice and emerging technology. Towels become a canvas. Repetition of symbolism, exploring the joy and everyday experience and applying constraints of the subject, color pallet, scale, and time produce works ranging from 9x12” to 69x85”. Using symbolism as a visual language and embracing errors, creativity is processed through an understanding of physical spaces, homes, rooms, and objects. 

Digital paintings tell stories of lived experience through nature, and surrealist landscapes push multipoint perspective, creating endless journeys for both the artist and viewer to visit within one work. The SURFACE SCOPE is the beginning, and middle, leaving room for much more as each artist continues their creative pursuits. 

EMBODIMENT TERRAIN

EXHIBITION text by sam light

The “lay of the land” can note both the physicality of space itself and the figural subject encompassed within it. Tangible in form, there is a knowledge of self and place existing and interacting on multiple fields.

The embodied self holds truth. Oscillating through unique spaces (a plateau, mountain, plain, valley, tundra, oasis, steppe, desert, swamp, forest, marsh, river, hill) the inhabitable environments allow for the complete realization of experience.

Depicting a feeling, idea, memory, experience, and wish, new mark-making across surfaces are inherently referential. Past experiences abstract themselves into new dreams. Surrealist visions link to staged moments of reality. Want and desire dance together. Reworked historical visuals site a continued conversation about truth. Unique perspectives on lived experience call to action new ventures. Through a departure in career, place, and self, identity is honored, transformed, and reflected. 

The works exhibited in EMBODIMENT TERRAIN highlight five artists each approaching the discipline of painting in a unique way. All working large-scale, the works become immersive, commanding a collaboration with the viewer to understand the layers of truth being presented. Intentionally considering materials, size, and symbols, each piece regards the sense of a figure existing and responding to a physical or imagined space. 

BOUNDLESS SPHERE

EXHIBITION text by sam light

Spaces within limits have the ability to still possess infinite opportunities. Creativity seeks a center point, the moment of epiphany surrounded by stimulation and imagination.

The shape (or space) of a sphere acknowledges room for creativity to form and evolve. Existing not only without edges, the signaler surface of the sphere encompasses a realm of creativity that is expansive and ever-changing.

Immersive video installation, site-specific sculpture, paintings ranging from oil on canvas to acrylic on plastic, reimagined architectural drawings, and digital illustrations with accompanying text minted as non-fungible tokens find a connection to one another as a result of shared experience within the residency.

The works exhibited in BOUNDLESS SPHERE highlight artists working to reach the center point of their creativity, after each traveling from an equidistant starting point. Each work is a reflection of experience, where the idea of storytelling through visual media is developed with the use of unconventional materials, historical references, narrative symbols, and a shift in process to consider a specific group exhibition as an intentional output.

incidental amalgamation

EXHIBITION text by sam light

The likely (assumed) result of combining (uniting)

Carrie Able Gallery presents a group exhibition of new works from the Early Summer 2021 AIR Program. Highlighting seven emerging artists based in New York City, this exhibition considers the result of creativity and collaboration being developed, and expanded upon, over the last 2 months.

Working across media, each artist in some way overlaps and blends seemingly disparate theories or references to produce a realized new work. Responding to experience, works consider how traditional methods of mark-making, video collage, 2D collage, painting, sculpture, and textile design can expand to fit into a contemporary environment.

2D prints read as 3D spaces, the surface of the canvas expands beyond the assumed dimensions. Folk Art symbolism suggests digital renderings, oil paintings become NFTs, sculptures are informed by investigation and mythology, new urban landscapes are built from the collaged source material.

Accompanying all of this is a new sense of community. A rebirth back into creative spaces, with intentional and actionable results. INCIDENTAL AMALGAMATION highlights the result and/or effect of traditional media being reworked, reimagined, and redistributed in a better state of harmony.

EXHIBITION IN 360 VR CAPTURE

Immersion site

EXHIBITION text by sam light

“Site-specific” — How do we define place in an increasingly digital world? 

Specificity of place is a key component in understanding experience. Every day, new questions surrounding where one was, where one is, and where one is going, shape and evolve identity. 

Artists use knowledge of place to explore natural dualities that exist, often finding meaning within powerful points of tension. Themes such as public vs. private, growing vs. decaying, urban vs. rural, loud vs. quiet, all speak to different components of identity and experience. 

The works exhibited in IMMERSION SITE highlight artists working to define place, both responding to, and asking new questions about self, and the world around oneself. 

Can digital space be considered site-specific? Is “digital vs. physical” the contemporary duality in art/creativity? 

Experimental works on wood or paper, reimagined traditional photographic and oil painting techniques, non-fungible tokens, performance, video, and installation all speak to the notion of “site-specific”. Each a departure from traditionally recognized sculpture or land-art existing in this genre, the “site” these works reflect on is perhaps a new, third, ambiguous space, both digital and physical. 

A space where there is a moment of understanding. A moment of confusion followed by clarity. A space where something physical becomes digital, and something digital becomes physical. A moment where reality blends into something slightly greater than before. 

You are at a site — a physical environment. 

You are on a (web)site —a digital environment. 

You are in the IMMERSION SITE — a moment of clarity within any environment.