Scott Draves and Cheonae Kim
Two-Person Exhibition
February 27 - August 14, 2010
Michael Berger Gallery presents a new exhibition featuring the work of Cheonae Kim and Scott Draves. Both artists will be in attendance for the Champagne Reception from 2:00-5:00 PM on Saturday, February 27th. The Faure String Trio will perform as part of the celebration.
CHEONAE KIM uses the simplest elements of line, form, space and color to investigate the complex and layered aspects of the human condition. Her commitment to geometric abstraction speaks to her sincere pursuit of using art as a means of attaining truth and her desire to keep alive a long-revered tradition.
For this exhibition, Kim created work that responds to particular senses of “place”. In June of 2009, Kim was invited to be a part of a six-week artist residency in Cadaqués, Spain. This time is documented in the gallery's installation of collages. Cadaqués is located on a bay called the Costa Brava on the Mediterranean Sea, which Kim recalls, “has a beautiful blue calmness”. The works on exhibit are a selection from more than 1500 collages that Kim created based on her experiences there. Each tiny collage captures, in extreme intricacy, a specific sensation of light captured when looking out to the sea at a particular, marked time. Collectively, the collages come together to form a body that moves like a powerful wave, which successfully brings the “beautiful blue calmness” into the gallery space. Kim's larger works in this exhibition are abstract portraits of the places she traveled through in Egypt in 2008. Utilizing color and structure as a means of representation, these paintings exemplify Kim’s incredible color sophistication, which she uses as a means to translate the tangible sensations of a particular space and time through the language of abstraction.
SCOTT DRAVES has turned his PhD from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University to a fine arts exploration of the relationship between man and machine. His work investigates the ways in which technology and digital creations are capable of sustainably and accurately representing our experience of the world today. Moreover, he is interested in the ways that the philosophies of science and open-source can be applied to art. He has said, “I believe the free flow of code is an increasingly important social and artistic force.”
The works on display all stem from of an original idea which Draves named, “The Electric Sheep Project.” For this project, Draves created software that runs an internet-distributed “supercomputer” program, which anyone can download and run. All participants work together determine the formation and movement of different series of images, through open source, crowd source, and voting. The moving images are referred to as “sheep.” Sheep that gain votes through this software then reproduce according to a genetic algorithm. As the network focuses more attention onto the “sheep,” they became higher resolution and more complex. Draves says, “This mirrors the process by which the more attention you give an idea, the more detail and structure appears.”
The exhibition includes a selection of different “sheep” that Draves has chosen and edited from his software system’s results, each of which have become of personal significance to him. These high-resolution videos feature incredibly detailed evolving artificial forms of life.