StandardVision Artist Showcase: Exploring the Strange Familiar with New Media Artist Nancy Baker Cahill
In collaboration with Vellum LA, StandardVision continues its site specific art programming on the large-scale curved exterior digital facade at Melrose & Spaulding with innovative new media artist Nancy Baker Cahill’s Slipstream series, on view November 1st through 20th.
Using analog and digital mediums to create immersive drawings that explore power, selfhood, and embodied consciousness, the work of Nancy Baker Cahill encourages viewers to observe hyperobjects through visceral intuition. Her Slipstream series examines the invented truths borne out of an individual’s awareness of reality. Evolutionarily speaking, each of us perceives our own distinct reality and are indelibly influenced by the realities that are shared with us. While invented truths are often deployed broadly for the purposes of oppression, disinformation campaigns and mass manipulation, Baker Cahill’s series embraces the ever-changing concept of truth itself. Each hybridized artwork in the series toys with and dwells in the murky territories of consciousness. Additive and subtractive in their construction, these transmutations embody a self-organizing logic.
Baker Cahill’s Slipstream artworks begin as graphite drawings on paper, launching a long odyssey of production. The drawings are then torn into pieces and reconfigured into bespoke, sculptural configurations. Echoing recombinant DNA, each installation represents an iterative version of the one before. Documented as 3D objects, they are altered, lit and animated using CG software. Once composited, they exist as discrete looped videos. A final step returns them to paper—forever altered—as archival prints, in triptychs, which isolate sequential dramatic moments in their respective animations. These artworks gesture towards the organic, as simulated fictions of botanical forms. Each offers a familiar referent with no natural analogue.
Nancy Baker Cahill is a renowned media artist and the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free Augmented Reality (AR) art platform exploring resistance and inclusive creative expression. Her geolocated AR installations have been exhibited globally and have earned her profiles in the New York Times, Frieze Magazine, and The Art Newspaper, among other publications. Baker Cahill was also included in ARTnews’ list of 2021 Deciders. Her work has been internationally exhibited at museums and galleries, including Francisco Carolinum Linz, The Hermitage (upcoming), The Buk-Seoul Museum of Art (SEMA), Honor Fraser Gallery, and König Gallerie. Baker Cahill is a TED speaker, an artist scholar in the Berggruen Institute’s Transformations of the Human Fellowship, the Art and Creative Technologies Advisor for the XRSI Safety Initiative, and a member of the Guild of Future Architects.
In collaboration with Vellum LA, StandardVision is also thrilled to be featuring Nancy Baker Cahill’s work at this year’s Infinity Festival, happening this week from November 2nd-4th. Baker Cahill’s Slipstream series will be displayed on StandardVision’s state-of-the-art Luma Canvas screens at the festival’s Art & Tech gallery which is open to attendees on November 3rd and 4th, and will take place alongside exciting panel discussions that will dive into NFTs as well as the development and inner workings of the metaverse. Catch Baker Cahill’s Slipstream series on view on the exterior digital facade at Melrose & Spaulding through November 20th, and purchase tickets to Infinity Festival below.
