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Join us in celebrating Gallery 44's fall exhibitions opening in three galleries!
In the Main Gallery, Cold Data presents the culminating work of 2023-2024 Artists-in-Residence Soft Turns. During their residency, Soft Turns researched non-human and decentralized intelligences from plants, ant colonies, watersheds and AI networks. The differences of these ‘decentralized intelligences’ from the Western tradition are striking: non-linear decision making, self-organizing systems, brainless organisms solving sophisticated spatial problems, ecosystems maintaining their own climate. Human-built environments, on the other hand, usually involve massive expenditures of energy, materials, rigid planning and control—without which our greenhouses, parkland, homes and data centers would fail; for example, in 2013 an actual cloud formed inside a Facebook data center and it began to rain.
In the Vitrines, Animorphs*, named after the young adult novels popularized in the late 1990s, orbits the same prismatic, alien, science-fiction-inspired iconography of its namesake. Typically depicting humans amidst a transformation into various animals, these iconic book covers are the genesis of artist Philip Leonard Ocampo’s explorations of animism, the metahuman, spirituality, nostalgia and becoming.
In the Members' Gallery, Present Elsewhere explores the fragile and shifting nature of memory when longing for home. Rooted in personal recollections of her grandparents’ house in Iran, artist Marzieh Miri turns to surrealist painting and Persian poetry for inspiration—particularly Mohammad-Reza Shafiei Kadkani’s poem Migration of the Violets, and carrying one’s homeland as "easily as violets in a box of soil”, where displacement and belonging are intimate yet collective experiences.
Thank you to our reception sponsor
