Envy: One Sin, Seven Stories at the Hudson River Museum is part of The Seven Deadly Sins, the inaugural exhibition of the Fairfield/Westchester Museum Alliance (FWMA), a cultural collaboration begun in 2009. Each member organization is presenting one of the seven deadly sins, from spring to fall, 2015. Sin, the favorite subject of poets and painters, also provides grist for FWMA's summer programming, which is offered to the public and free to the members of FWMA organizations.
It's visual. It's vernacular. It's emoji art
New media artist Carla Gannis uses signs from our everyday speech and images from our everyday experiences to create her modern digital collage — The Garden of Emoji Delights that resonates with the revolutionary triptych — The Garden of Earthly Delights by 16th-artist Hieronymus Bosch. Where Bosch showed the frailty of humans in a space he peopled with the religious symbols of his time, Gannis looks to the digital symbols of our own time to critique consumerism.
Gannis, who teaches art that moves across digital platforms and enlivens Apps, is at home, too, within Bosch's triplicate world of Eden, Earth, and Hell. The temptations over the centuries are the same but not the images: Gannis transforms Bosch's cavorting nude sinners into cuddly, rounded emojis, whose real natures are not perceived as threatening, at first.
The Garden of Emoji Delights - Eden 01 |
Gannis's adventure into the brave new world of emoticoms, whose seeming simplicity pulls us back to the pictographs of hieroglyphics and even cave paintings, is also a questioning: which signs, symbols, and codes, today, best convey the truths the contemporary artist wants to tell?
Editor's Note:
Having been to the Hudson River Museum to see the Red Grooms Exhibit in the late 1970s, recommend also seeing the Bookstore installation of that exhibit today. We'd also be interested in the Nybelwyck Hall 26-room dollhouse while there.
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