Bleeding Edge

BLEEDING EDGE
On View, March 4 – May 15
Opening Reception, March 24, 6:30 -9:00
Film Screening, Hotel Dallas, March 25, 5:00-
6:14

Participating Artists: Anthony Antonellis,
Kelsey Brod, Izabela Gola, Faith Holland,
Eleanor King, Amanda Turner Pohan, Livia
Ungur, and Sherng-Lee Huang

In collaboration with Peekskill’s Art Industry Media initiative, the Hudson Valley Center for
Contemporary Art is proud to present Bleeding Edge​, an exhibition of artists working in
greater New York pushing boundaries in new media. Bleeding Edge​ investigates
human-technological entanglements specifically how global networks have affected the
ways in which we express intimacy, identity, and history, focusing on moments where
technology fails to keep up with the complexities of the lived human experience. Using
metaphor as well as formal means, these eight artists appropriate, subvert, and exploit the
nuances of consumer technology, recognizing the tenuous line between emancipatory
cyber-utopia and omnipresent corporate surveillance as a necessary site for artistic
intervention and play. Bleeding Edge​ takes its title from an industry term referring to
technology so innovative it comes with incredible risk and an alarmingly high rate of failure.

Kelsey Brod explores questions of identity and representation through the production of
politicized program tutorials,in which racial and gendered hierarchies within software are
revealed as extensions of institutionalized power structures. In Faith Holland’s series of
photographs Queer Connections, the gendered ‘male/female’ nomenclature of wire ends
are subverted using pastel nail polish as an adhesive to make feminized unintended
connections. Amanda Turner Pohan similarly uses the physicality of abandoned
technology to explore mediated human intimacy. Along strip of wall covered in the dust of
discarded computer monitors acts as an alluring and unsettling memento mori, which hints
at the growing obsolesce of the technology as well as the aging state of its owner. Eleanor
King uses Google Maps to explore the wilderness surrounding an Inuit village in
northernmost Canada. The lifeless computerized illustration of the landscape however
points more towards government surveillance and hydrocarbon exploration than any
sense of natural majesty. The characters in Izabela Gola’s vignettes depict characters
completely ignorant of the digitized limbo they inhabit. Men scream tired Hollywood
clichés at each other, demanding answers and receiving no resolution. Ungur & Huang’s
feature length film, Hotel Dallas, (showing March 25th at 5 pm) explores communist
Romania’s failed attempt to use American primetime television as anti-capitalist
propaganda, framed through an autobiographical coming of age story, which blurs the
boundary between fact and fiction. Anthony Antonellis’ gif-inspired video works explore
the failed commodities of the hyper-present, and the curatorial conundrum of exhibiting
art created for the internet. Bleeding Edge​ celebrates these diverse and imaginative artists
which use media to critique notions of progress, tradition, and innovation.

IMAGE: Faith Holland, Queer Connections (detail)