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BUNKER Gallery Brings Art and Tech to Sotheby’s

Launch Slideshow

For New York-based artist Gabriel Barcia-Colombo, technology is not merely a tool to create work, but an active collaborator. He focuses on collections, memorialisation and the act of leaving one’s digital imprint for the next generation, ideas that have taken the form of video sculptures, immersive performances, large-scale projections and even vending machines that sell human DNA. Also a curator, the 35-year-old Barcia-Colombo launched a roving pop-up gallery called BUNKER, which since 2014 has featured artists who collaborate with technology to create code-driven sculpture, augmented reality and virtual installation. Now, as an artist in residence, Barcia-Colombo is bringing BUNKER to Sotheby’s, where he has curated an exhibition of eight artists who “use technology as an artful lens to express desire, vulnerability and memory through a translation of the physical to the digital,” he explains. In addition, Barcia-Colombo is participating in The Art of VR, a conference taking place 22–23 June at Sotheby’s New York. Click ahead for a preview of Barcia-Colombo’s BUNKER show, which runs 22 June through 22 July.  

BUNKER Gallery Brings Art and Tech to Sotheby’s

  • Ashley Zelinskie, Android, 2016, a nickel-plated 3-D printed nylon sculpture.
    Brooklyn-based artist Ashley Zelinskie uses simple code, recursive structures, redundant patterns, and emergent media in novel combinations. Her work is designed to be appreciated by both humans and computers. Blurring the lines between art and technology, Zelinskie’s practice spans a variety of media, from sculpture to computer programmes.  



     

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  • Carla Gannis, The Garden of Emoji Delights, 2014.
    In the late 1990s, Brooklyn-based painter Carla Gannis began incorporating net and digital elements into her work. She combines famous works of art with technology, transforming iconic, art historical images with technology. With The Garden of Emoji Delights, for example, Gannis reconstructs Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych for the digital era.


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  • Christian Lemmerz, La Apparazione, 2017.
    Regardless of the material, form or medium, Christian Lemmerz’s oeuvre is extensive and pluralistic, and his work can generally be characterized by aesthetics of effect. The artworks grasp out and clutch the surrounding environment and call for more than merely contemplation. The artist’s first VR piece, La Apparazione, is a golden figure of Christ based on a small-scale bronze sculpture that Lemmerz made in 2013. In VR, the intensely muscled figure spews molten gold from various stigmata. By consciously blending ideals of Renaissance painting and comic books, Lemmerz created a work that he thinks of as a hybrid between the Silver Surfer and Jesus.

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  • Jamie Zigelbaum, Doorway To The Soul, 2015.
    Jamie Zigelbaum is an artist, designer, and engineer living in New York. His Doorway to the Soul is a digital sculpture that displays the faces of Amazon mechanical turk workers as they are recorded. These workers are paid $0.25 to stare into their webcam for one minute. The videos are scaled to life-size and played directly on a display mounted at average human height. The sculpture acts as a commentary on the ever changing nature of digital communication. Two people, standing face to face looking each other in the eyes. Today one has to ask: can they see me?

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  • A digital self-portrait by Jeremy Bailey.
    Video and performance artist Jeremy Bailey’s work is often confidently self-deprecating in offering hilarious parodies of new media vocabularies. Bailey, who works primarily in electronic media, has been described by Filmmaker magazine as “a one-man revolution on the way we use video, computers and our bodies to create art.” His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions and festivals internationally. He is also co-founder of 640 480 Video Collective, an award-winning international collective of sculpture and video artists who create conceptual interdisciplinary new-media projects.

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  • Pedro G. C. Oliveira, K7
    Pedro G. C. Oliveira is a Brazilian artist who works at the intersection of homemade electronics, design and code. His K7 (Portuguese for ca-ssette) series features unique audio cassette sculptures which play generative music composed entirely from one line of code.  Oliveira’s sculptures are made of homemade circuit boards, LED lights and motors, each functioning as a physical representation of a digital musical programming language. The sculptures, presented in glass vitrines, reference both fetishised digital Apple products and the remains of scientific specimens.

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  • Rosalie Yu, Embrace In Progress
    Rosalie Yu is a Taiwanese artist whose slit-scan sculptures explore conflicted feelings of shared intimacy and are reflections on her own personal relationship to the body mediated by technology. Yu uses depth sensors and photogrammetry to capture a series of intimate embraces with strangers that are then 3-D printed into sculptures that represent the length of each encounter. The resulting compositions reference traditional sculptures such as Rodin’s The Kiss, yet appear deformed and distorted by the very technology used to create them.


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  • A viewer experiencing Sarah Rothberg’s virtual reality work Memory/Place: My House, 2014–15.
    With Memory/Place: My House, Sarah Rothberg presents us with an entryway to her own childhood via virtual reality environments composed entirely from her own old VHS tapes. Viewers are invited to journey into Rothberg’s childhood home in virtual reality and spend time in the middle of an environment which is entirely composed of her memories. Created in 2014 in the immediate wake of Facebook’s purchase of Oculus, Rothberg’s work speculates on the emotional impact that future technology will have on personal memories.


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