The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch’s most ambitious work, embodies the conflicts, humor, darkness and absurdity of human, earthly and cosmological conditions. The Garden of Emoji Delights’ intention was to mash up popular historic and contemporary sign systems, and to diversify and expand the Emoji lexicon through this process. Emoji are a contemporary glyph system which offer an emotional shorthand for virtual expression. The pleasurable stylizations are ubiquitous worldwide and across generations. Translating iconography of an earlier era using Emoji seems to makes perfect “nonsense.” Gannis produced both a 2D print and moving image version of the “emojified garden.” The static work is a direct homage to Bosch — deeply tied in scale and physicality to the original. The moving image version allowed Gannis to be more dynamic with a hybrid visual vocabulary.
LOCATION: Governors Island, Nolan Park Building 8a
DATES AND TIMES: May 25 – July 22, 2018
TIMES: Fri. Sat. Sun and Holiday Mondays noon – 5 pm
Governors Island New York Ferry Schedule
Since her arrival in New York in the 1990s, Carla Gannis has been exploring the language of the digital medium in physical and virtual works. Gannis received an MFA in painting from Boston University and is faculty and assistant chair of the Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute, New York. She has engaged with the virtual domain by collaging threads of networked communication, online art history, and speculative fiction to produce dark and often humorous explorations of the human condition. Gannis’s work has appeared in numerous exhibitions and screenings, nationally and internationally, including Lady Ava Interface, Sunrise Sunset, Whitney Museum, NYC; Portraits in Landscape, Midnight Moment, Times Square Arts, NYC; Until the End of the World, DAM Gallery, Berlin; A Subject Self-Defined, TRANSFER Gallery, Brooklyn; and The Garden of Emoji Delights, Hudson River Museum, Yonkers. Gannis’s speculative fiction has appeared in DEVOURING THE GREEN:: fear of a human planet: a cyborg / eco poetry anthology, published by Jaded Ibis Press (2015).