Saturday July 27 2019
3 – 5 pm
Building 10a, Nolan Park, Governors Island
Exhibition artist Amanda Gutierrez will talk and lead a sound walk about Flâneuse>La caminanta, a video documentary edited as a VR (virtual reality), using a 360-degree camera to document soundwalks of female participants in the public space. The title emphasizes a missing word in the French and Spanish language of women as wanderers.
Followed by an artist talk with Mollye Bendell on her process and her forthcoming virtual reality work, the language of the angels. An interactive artwork taking place in a single bedroom, the language of the angels uses VR to explore both the gamification of virtual spaces and changing conceptions of space and place within our own consciousness. After the talk, stay to experience the work in its first of 12 iterations.
the language of the angels is an immersive virtual reality artwork that uses a bedroom to playfully address our changing conception of space within our own consciousness. The work consists of an obsessively detailed model of my bedroom that adapts and transforms as the user interacts with it. Biweekly for six months, I will release a new “chapter” of the room, in which user interaction creates alternate realities within that room, playing with the idea of serial storytelling and exploring physical and virtual concepts of place. The work considers consciousness as a paradise and a prison. The tension between technology and consciousness has captivated artists since the birth of mechanized reproduction. the language of the angels uses my own mind to search for the “soul” of virtual reality as I construct a reality in search of my own soul. I am intimately familiar with the feeling that I am a captive of my own mind. The room represents the reality we construct and manipulating it represents the way we internalize that reality – even if those coping mechanisms ultimately consume our physical bodies.
Mollye Bendell makes digital and analog sculptures for digital and analog worlds. Her practice explores the dissolving line between the digital and the physical that defines the human/user experience of “things.” The act of making unfamiliar methods approachable as a teacher has pushed her artistic practice towards unfamiliar media such as virtual reality, 3D printing, laser cutting, CNC machining, circuit building and bending, and codeable objects. Mollye earned her BA in Sculpture from the Glasgow School of Art in 2012 and completed her MFA in Intermedia and Digital Arts at UMBC in 2018. In 2018, she was selected for the Young Blood, an annual juried show of new MFAs. She recently completed a residency at Wave Farm to work on a series of sculptural radios. With two collaborators in strikeWare collective, Mollye received a Rubys Artist Grant to complete a body of work in 2019 addressing segregation in public schools in both historical and contemporary contexts. She lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. She is currently an artist in residence at Harvestworks.