Where will you find a 3D printed sculpture of it-girl Julianna Huxtable, a working shower in the lobby, and a 3D animated video of comedian Casey Jane Ellison? The New Museum’s triennial of course. This week, the young but well-established Manhattan-based epicenter of downtown cool premieres its third incarnation of the event initiated in 2009. Featuring more than 50 artists from around the globe, it’s the only one of its kind that’s dedicated to early-career artists. This year’s exhibition—centered on digital art—is co-curated by the museum’s own Lauren Cornell and LA-based video artist Ryan Trecartin.
Based on digital art, the predictive (rather than retrospective) exhibition features a multitude of disciplines from sculpture to painting to performance. “Surround Audience explores the effects of an increasingly connected world both on our sense of self and identity as well as on art’s form and larger social role. The exhibition looks at our immediate present, a time when culture has become more porous and encompassing and new considerations about art’s role and potential are surfacing. Artists are responding to these evolving conditions in a number of ways, from calculated appropriations to critical interrogations to surreal or poetic statements,” the press release reads.
Despite what one might could have expected from Cornell, former executive director of Rhizome, and digitally hyper-charged artist, Trecartin. “I think there is this kind of expectation, because Ryan and I are the curators, that the show is going to be all holograms and that we’re going to fly in on U.F.O.s. But it’s because there are still pretty simplistic ways of thinking about art in the digital age. That kind of online-offline binary that used to exist about art made with technology or the Internet as a factor doesn’t really exist anymore,” explained Cornell to the New York Times about the exhibition.
Excited by the stream of new and experimental artists, we will be interviewing our top ten picks over the course of the next 2 weeks. Stay tuned!