Whitehot Magazine
"The Best Art In The World"
By COCO DOLLE April, 2023
One day and night Happening / pop u-up view until April 10, 2023
Artists included: Anne Spalter, Ana María Caballero, Addie Wagenknecht, Olive Allen, Operator, The Josh Craig, Carrie Able, Mieke Marple, Chole Karayia, Aguri Sagimori, Garret Kane, Ori Carino, Solimán López, Stacie Ant, Coco Dolle, Karmimadeebora McMillan, Aaron Alden, Linda Dounia Rebeiz, Somi Nwandu, Michael Alan, and Orkhan Mammadov.
Spanning over six floors in the multimedia space of Lume Studios, Excavating EX Machina is a multisensory immersive experience initiative by blue chip gallery director Raina Marie. Set as a gigantic festival, the exhibition features high profiled digital artists working in NFTs, music and multimedia. The installations are designed to reimagine an excavation of this same show millions of years from now. The audience is given the impression of witnessing the remnants and ruins of a metaverse show. Excavating EX Machina explores the creation of myths in the 21st century. Heroes and antiheroes are colliding in an aesthetic symphony. The exhibition describes a moment of unprecedented crossroads of an imminent yet unknown singularity.
The opening event presented live performances on the first floor by multi talented Carrie Able and a poetry reading by award winning poet Ana Maria Caballero within an immersive projection room. Throughout the day and evening, the room rotated selected animations and visual stills selected by Raina Marie from artists in the show. In the backroom, works by Olive Allen are projected, cycling through different works that portray characters from contemporary culture in a dystonia universe.
The basement floor features 8 of the artists shown on vertical screens, also displayed in The Spirit Realm, a virtual environment designed by XELEVEN. The second floor features Soliman Lopez’s OLEA project, projected on walls and displayed on a screen.
The third floor is taken over by the Multimedia artist Josh Craig, presenting a world of multimedia and music. 11-88 WORLD is his international creative community. His installation featured a writing and drawing high performance robot machine station.
The fourth floor displayed a variety of genres and NFT artists including Bushwick-born street wizard painter Michael Alan and digital abstract expressionist Aaron Alden who told me how he enjoys “traditional painting techniques applied to the generative form”.
The fifth floor is displaying the works of Ori Carino, a native East Village artist and son of Toyo Tsuchiya involved in the Rivington School art movement of the East Village art scene of New York City in the 1980s.
Showcasing a variety of mediums from airbrush paintings on silk to digital works on screens, Ori’s works are questioning urban decay and historical meaning. His digital works are 3D scans made from discarded objects he found on his city walks. Particularly ephemeral objects that are bound to disappear. 3D scans are then rendered and turned into assemblages as NFT or 3D printed sculptures.
The exhibition “Excavating EX Machina” is both a physical and digital artistic tour de force where present, past and future art communities meet together from yet unpaved road maps. WM
Coco Dolle is a French-American artist, writer, and independent curator based in New York since the late 90s. Former dancer and fashion muse for acclaimed artists including Alex Katz, her performances appeared in Vogue and The NY Times. Over the past decade, she has organized numerous exhibitions acclaimed in high-end publications including Forbes, ArtNet, VICE, and W Magazine. She is a contributing writer for L’Officiel Art and Whitehot Magazine. As an artist, her work focuses on body politics and feminist issues as seen at the Oregon Contemporary (OR) and Mary Ryan Gallery (NYC).
Follow her on instagram.
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