When The Body Is Present / When The Body Is Not Present- Ally Christmas (Athens, GA)
The antiseptic relationship our culture has with the dead creates the need to distort reality by disguising death’s pallor, involving a ritualistic process of pumping the body full of chemicals and transforming it into an imitation of its former self. Without a living agency, the body becomes a hollow vessel; ready for expelling, filling, and masking. By purposefully creating a fiction of repose, the mortician lures the viewer’s mind away from our finite mortality and toward something more easily digestible, though less tangible.
Ally Christmas (b. 1991 in Northern VA) is a visual artist currently living and working out of Athens, GA. After earning her BA in Photography from the University of Virginia in 2013, Christmas went on to stay at the school for another year as a recipient of the 5th Year Aunspaugh Fellowship. She is an active member of the Society for Photographic Education, from whom she received a Graduate Student Award in 2016 to attend their national conference. She is currently pursuing her Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Georgia in Photo/Video, and she has taught a number of courses at the college level – including Contemporary Video, Intro to Photo & Image Culture, and Art Criticism.
The Knife Cuts Two Ways – Angela Ferraiolo (New York)
The Knife Cuts Two Ways (2017) continues my interests in generative and
systems art. It was abstracted from the pop styles of comic books, music
festivals, and Otaku culture, but also inspired by Korean scroll
painting, flocking algorithms, modular installation, and the city of
Hong Kong. Bright colors, continual motion, and repeating patterns are
meant to engage viewers both up close and from a distance. Nearby,
Knife is full of small surprises, and tries to reward the attentive
viewer with small, continual variation. From a distance, Knife is meant
to feel like a huge, abstract comic book.
Angela Ferraiolo is a visual artist working with systems, noise,
randomness, and generative processes. Her work has been screened
internationally including SIGGRAPH, ISEA (Vancouver, Hong Kong), the New
York Film Festival, Courtisane, the Australian Experimental Film
Festival (Melbourne), and the International Conference of Generative Art
(Rome, Venice). New projects include further experiments in urban
screen, generative art, and ambient media.
Impossible Creature of a Digital Spirituality – Balam Soto (Hartford, CT)
Balam Soto creates contemporary, exploratory artworks that fuse low tech with high tech, including interactive art installations, public artworks, and video. Balam works independently on the artistic and technical sides of his pieces, incorporating technologies, including custom software and electronics.
