Graphite Drawings Reconfigured As Animated Biomorphic Landscapes
Exploring the Ever-Changing Concept of Truth
Still from Slipstream Times Square by Nancy Baker Cahill. Photo courtesy of the artist and Times Square Arts.
(NEW YORK, NY — June 23, 2022) — Times Square Arts, the largest public platform for contemporary performance and visual arts, is pleased to present Slipstream Times Square by artist Nancy Baker Cahill for the month of July as part of the organization’s signature Midnight Moment series.
Midnight Moment is the world’s largest, longest-running digital art exhibition, synchronized on over 90 electronic billboards throughout Times Square nightly from 11:57 pm to midnight. This year, Times Square Arts is celebrating the ten-year anniversary of the Midnight Moment series with a roster of all women artists until April 2023.
Using analog and digital mediums to create immersive artworks that explore power, selfhood, and embodied consciousness, the work of Nancy Baker Cahill encourages viewers to experience her installations through visceral intuition. The artist utilizes drawing as the foundation for all her technological works, blurring the intersections between fine art, new media, and activism.
Nancy Baker Cahill’s Slipstream Times Square transfigures the bewildering, dizzying energy of Times Square through pulsing, heaving, abstract artwork on 90 screens. Hybridity is the beating heart of the artwork, which attempts to collapse traditional moving images with a living, breathing work that threatens to spill out into the open shared space. Graphite drawings, torn into sculptures that form the shifting landscape in the video, glisten as they breathe, expand, and contract. Occupying space normally reserved for capitalistic exhortations, the video slyly reveals the non-commercial analog technology of drawing, blurring its origins with dazzling pixels and bringing it to life for viewers. Slipstream Times Square aims to transform this iconic space by inviting conversations about what is real, what is alive, and what we see and feel when digital/analog boundaries are blurred.
“Slipstream Times Square, like other videos in the series, dwells in the murky territories of consciousness but does so here multiplied, at scale, for a collective public audience. This artwork gestures toward the organic, as a simulated fiction of botanical and biomorphic forms. Spread across millions of LED nodes, It offers a familiar referent with no natural analog.” said artist Nancy Baker Cahill.
Nancy Baker Cahill’s Slipstream artworks begin as graphite drawings on paper, launching a long odyssey of production. The drawings are then torn into pieces and reconfigured into bespoke, sculptural configurations. Echoing recombinant DNA, each installation represents an iterative version of the one before. Documented as 3D objects, they are altered, lit, and animated using CG software. Once composited, they exist as discrete looped videos. A final step returns them to paper—forever altered—as archival prints, in triptychs, which isolate sequential dramatic moments in their respective animations. These artworks gesture toward the organic, as simulated fictions of botanical forms. Each offers a familiar referent with no natural analog.
ABOUT NANCY BAKER CAHILL
Nancy Baker Cahill is a new media artist who examines power, selfhood, and embodied consciousness through drawing and shared immersive space. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free Augmented Reality (AR) art platform exploring resistance and inclusive creative expression.
Her geolocated AR installations have been exhibited globally and have earned her profiles in the New York Times, Frieze Magazine, and The Art Newspaper, among other publications, and she was included in ARTnews' list of 2021 'Deciders'. Her work has been internationally exhibited at museums and galleries, including Francisco Carolinum Linz, The Hermitage, The Buk-Seoul Museum of Art (SEMA), Honor Fraser Gallery, and Konig Gallerie. In February of 2022, she was one of two featured artists in the Elevation 1049 Biennial in Switzerland. Baker Cahill was an artist scholar in the Berggruen lnstitute's inaugural Transformations of the Human Fellowship, and a 2021 resident at Oxy Arts' 'Encoding Futures,' focused on virtual monuments. She is a TEDx speaker and a member of the Guild of Future Architects. In 2021, she was awarded the Williams College Bicentennial Medal of Honor and received a 2022 C.O.L.A. Master Artist Fellowship.
ABOUT TIMES SQUARE ARTS
Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, collaborates with contemporary artists and cultural institutions to experiment and engage with one of the world's most iconic urban places. Through the Square's electronic billboards, public plazas, vacant areas and popular venues, and the Alliance's own online landscape, Times Square Arts invites leading contemporary creators, such as Mel Chin, Tracey Emin, Jeffrey Gibson, Ryan McGinley, Yoko Ono, and Kehinde Wiley, to help the public see Times Square in new ways. Times Square has always been a place of risk, innovation and creativity, and the Arts Program ensures these qualities remain central to the district's unique identity.
PRESS CONTACTS
Ali Rigo
Senior Account Executive, Cultural Counsel
ali@culturalcounsel.com
Lauren Gagnon
Account Coordinator, Cultural Counsel
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