Artists Get Contained in the “Glitch”

LOS ANGELES — I don’t find out about you, however the warmth has been powerful to deal with. Scorching summers and local weather change have been on individuals’s minds for some time, however it looks as if there’s been a tipping level this 12 months, bringing local weather change to the highest for nearly everybody I do know. The earth could be very giant and highly effective, and our extractive relationship to it’s leading to noticeable penalties for our day by day lives.

All of this makes We Are They: Glitch Ecology and the Thickness of Now at Honor Fraser Gallery a well timed exhibition that explores the roots of our relationship to ecosystems. The title borrows from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), by which she explores the thought of the glitch as an sudden error. The present’s thesis shifts away from this facet and into intentionality, the place artists “glitch to subvert and decenter human ego inside social and ecological hierarchies.” 

Glitch ecology seems in Don Edler’s “Untitled (mammoth video)” (2022) an AI-generated video piece  nestled inside “the mammoth within the room (Zed)” (2021–22) a large, spectacular skeleton composed of plywood, Styrofoam, used batteries, and different detritus. Zed is a beloved mammoth unearthed in Los Angeles’s La Brea Tar Pits. He seems within the video, the place we additionally study a concept that wooly mammoth searching by people might have contributed to local weather change on the finish of the Ice Age. As the speculation goes, dwarf birch bushes flourished with the demise of mammoths, darkening the reflective floor of the land across the Arctic. Whereas some latest analysis holds that human searching possible had a a lot smaller impact on mammoth extinction, what’s clear is that the extinction occasion accelerated ecosystem change.

The exhibition additionally attracts from Legacy Russell’s notion of Glitch Feminism — on this case, “‘glitch ecology’ is championed as a subversive device for clandestine self-expression, in addition to a catalyst for coalition constructing between non-human species and more-than-human forces.” This more-than-human factor emerges in lots of the works, which, on this context, I interpret as supernatural or magical forces. 

For instance, Aaron Elvis Jupin’s “Natures Guard Canine (Saviors)” (2023) is an acrylic depiction of a witch-like determine with scarecrow arms. At its knees is just a little white butterfly. And scattered all through the gallery are untitled concrete items by Star Feliz, which they discuss with as “Ground maps, or Portals into rising mysteries.” The concrete is pulled from a sidewalk in ruins, they usually present symbols harking back to esoteric spirals and arrows. I wished just a little extra curatorial steerage to hyperlink these works with the notion of glitches, however I discovered myself considering that these connections within the material of house and time counsel {that a} reconnection with the non secular world is a component and parcel of reuniting with, moderately than extracting from, pure forces. 

Andro Eradze’s “Raised within the Mud” (2022) which was a part of 2022’s Venice Biennale, occupies a video room of its personal. Within the movie, fireworks erupt over a nondescript forest, and taxidermied creatures, like a wolf and a hare, peek out within the flashes of sunshine. If this imaginative and prescient of apocalypse leaves little room for hope, Mimi Ọnụọha’s These Networks In Our Pores and skin (2021) depicts 4 ladies rewriting data cables with hair and different objects, as they reimagine and revise how the web is constructed from the bottom up.

Tabita Rezaire’s “Premium Join” (2017) begins with the sound of a gong and reminds us that “This isn’t a world that belongs to you. If you need a world which you’ll be able to enhance then you’ll be able to go and create one for your self. On this world you’ll take your home because the insignificant speck that you’re.” Flames erupt across the phrases, and the filmmaker takes us right into a glitchy, campy, mystical world between nature and machines, the place divination, The Matrix, and knowledge science all collide. The English phrase “glitch” derives from the Previous English glidan, from which we additionally get “glide.” The glitch, maybe, is that we thought expertise, the earth, and the spirit have been all separate issues when actually all of them glide collectively.

We Are They: Glitch Ecology and the Thickness of Now continues at Honor Fraser Gallery (2622 La Cienega Boulevard, Culver Metropolis) via August 26. The present was curated by Gallery Director Jamison Edgar.