Last night was the opening of the exhibition Greebles by Yara Flores (New York). It has been a pleasure to work with Yara towards this exhibition. We will have a conversation here on the blog with Yara over the coming month, so check back. I have included her statement below.
Part of an ongoing investigation into the materialization of virtual experiences, Greebles (2016) takes the form of forty-five small black statuettes that may be installed in a variety of groupings, configurations, and/or locations. Each is unique in specific form, but all share a general body-plan and common features (something like a head, something like horns, something like a nose, something like genitals). The word “greeble” hails originally from the world of cinematic special effect, and refers to the use of ambiguously legible forms in repeating arrays to create visual texture—frequently for the purpose of eliding (or elaborating) illusions of scale/distance. Translated to the domain of experimental psychology in the 1990s, the term has come to be associated with a discrete set of distinctly humanoid forms, sortable, on the basis of the orientation and configuration of their variant appendages, into five families (Samar, Omsit, Galli, Radok, Tasio), and two “genders” (Plok, Glip). Initially extant only as 3-D graphical objects suitable for representation and manipulation in screen-based psychology experiments (particularly those dealing with facial recognition and spatial reasoning), these virtual/experimental objects have here been reified in polyamide resin by the artist—who in other iterations of this project makes use of them in haptic exercises that involve learning to recognize a particular greeble “individual” by touch. Yara Flores is a New York-based artist whose work deals with the spiritual dimensions of technology. She was part of “Fifteen People Present Their Favorite Book (after Kosuth),” at Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana (2016) and Asad Raza’s “Home Show” (New York, 2015). Recent projects include: “Harold and the Janus-Faced Line” (in Tennis [Stockholm, Drucksache, 2015]); “Blood, Language, and Voom” (Cabinet 52, 2014); “Pound vs. Stevens: The Rematch” (in the “Aesthetics of Information” exhibition at Princeton University, 2014); and “The Death of Scheherazade: Fragments” (Tribes 14, 2013). With D. Graham Burnett and others, she contributed to “Waljagd im Wald” (Parkett 93, 2013).
RAYGUN 