Four Techspressionist Artists present on Chicago's largest public digital display

Install shot, 150 Media Stream, Photo by Michael Salisbury

By COCO DOLLE April 27, 2025

Chicago’s largest and most innovative digital art display, 150 Media Stream, presents a groundbreaking new exhibition, “Four Techspressionist Artists,” opening April 28 and running through July 20, 2025. Curated by Chicago-based video artist Yuge Zhou, the show features works by pioneering voices in the Techspressionist movement: Colin Goldberg, Renata Janiszewska, Karen LaFleur, and Jan Swinburne. The show explores how digital tools can become vehicles for psychological depth, poetic abstraction, and transformative storytelling that draws from 20th century art movements like Expressionism.

Housed in a monumental installation of 89 LED blades spanning 150 feet in length and rising 22 feet high, 150 Media Stream is a free, public, digital art platform that has commissioned over fifty original works from local and international artists alike since its launch in 2017. For this exhibition, Zhou says, "Curating this show has been a collective effort on every level. It's been wonderful collaborating with these four artists, who each approach 150 Media Stream's unique canvas with the technical and aesthetic variety that makes Techspressionism such an exciting artistic movement." Techspressionism is an emerging global movement that uses technology as a means for emotional, intuitive, and aesthetic expression.

The term Techspressionism was coined in 2011 by Colin Goldberg, a Vermont-based artist who sought a new way to describe his hybrid practice merging painting, digital media, and technology. On view is Interior Landscape, drawing on Abstract Expressionist spontaneity and Surrealist dream logic. The digital forms appear and dissolve in a mesmerizing cascade of color. The visuals are accompanied by a score by Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky).

Goldberg explains: "Techspressionism, as it relates to my work, describes an approach in which technology can be used to draw from the subconscious, following in the tradition of the emotionally-charged paintings of the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s or the automatic drawings of their predecessors, the Surrealists. As Pollock said, ‘each age finds its own technique’.”

Goldberg, Still from Interior Landscape, image courtesy of the artist

Where Goldberg leans into abstraction, Canadian artist Renata Janiszewska approaches Techspressionism through a lens of femininity. Her piece, Souffles Pastels (Pastel Sighs), has a palette of blush pinks, powder blues, and creams evokes traditional fashions. Intricate textures like lace and embroidery reference heritage and domestic arts. Portraiture co-exists with abstraction, suggestive of femininity's responses to social changes.
 

Janiszewska, Still from Souffles Pastels (Pastel Sighs),  image courtesy of the artist

Themes of transformation and interconnection emerge in Karen LaFleur’s Mycorrhizal, takes its name from a type of symbiotic relationship between plants and fungi, in which both organisms benefit from combining their root structures. With visuals that appear as organic circuitry, this work grows and moves through rapid changes. The score is by Nancy Tucker. LaFleur is a Massachusetts-based artist, writer, and animator, who works across digital and traditional media. Since 1981, she has focused on moving-image pieces that embrace abstract landscapes of transformation, revealing the hidden connections between interior and exterior worlds.

LaFleur, Still from Mycorrhizal,  image courtesy of the artist 

If LaFleur’s work looks beneath the surface of the earth, Jan Swinburne’s SONIC FLIGHT: Towards Peace looks skyward. The site-specific iteration of the artist’s larger SONIC FLIGHT project, which transforms a harsh sound into a place of blue serenity. The slow-moving visual is derived from the waveform image of a sonic boom recorded as a war jet flew over the Toronto Air Show.  Swinburne is a Toronto-based intermedia artist whose practice unites image, sculpture, and time-based media in various combinations. Exhibiting her work internationally, she returns to certain themes, including speech, language as landscape, and the de/regeneration of images and sounds.

Swinburne, Still from SONIC FLIGHT: Towards Peace,  image courtesy of the artist

 To mark the opening, a special hybrid event on May 1 will offer audiences the rare chance to meet the artists behind the work. A virtual artist talk with all four Techspressionists will be held over Zoom at 11:00 AM Central Time, followed by an in-person conversation at noon in the lobby of 150 N Riverside with Colin Goldberg and curator Yuge Zhou. These conversations promise valuable insight into how the artists are adapting digital tools for emotional expression, and how Techspressionism continues to evolve as a global, community-driven movement. WM
 

Four Techspressionist Artists

Curated by Yuge Zhou

Techspressionism Movement

Public Event: May 1 at 12 PM

150 North Riverside Plaza, Chicago, IL 60606

On view April 28 – July 20, 2025 Mon–Fri 11am–2pm, Saturdays 1–10pm

Meet the artist on zoom RSVP