prev / next

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

· · · · · · · · ·

Real time animation, wood relief oil on enamel, a part of the show Pixelville, D.A.C. Curator: Peter Frank

The title, Pixelville, derives in part from the responsivity of the concept to the Dumbo Arts Center exhibition gallery, a century-old space and part of a still-older complex known as “Gairville.” The historic resonance of the DAC space evokes, and provokes, artists’ Janus-headed sensitivity to the layering of past, present, and future in the urban context. This compression of time symptomatizes the anomalous dynamics of our era, the digital, or at least digitized, world that compresses time and space alike, and does so as much through the reordering of experience as through the mere reduction of volume or duration. We have access to the past as never before, and the future – for better or worse – seems to be similarly immediate. Does the present, then, still exist? Is there a place where the actual moment maintains? Pixelville manifests what is left of the present, a chaotic and fluctuating ambience in which the remnants of civilization, still functional or not, struggle to cohere. “Our envisioned city,” writes Alroy, “is in a constant state of motion” – not the constant, traditional state of motion that pulses through all cities, but a relatively new, and increasing, state of flux that refigures cities overall and ultimately re-defines their function(s).Nivi Alroy and Shirley Shor have imagined, and imaged, the city as the site of a continuous earthquake, a locus for precisely the kind of energy that threatens to blow apart loci. The city, in their view, may be a human product but it is not an artificial one, and its response over time to the accumulating needs of a changing, growing population is less logical than biological. In Pixelville, Alroy and Shor show “city planning” to be an oxymoron – both an intoxicating ideal and a thrilling reality.

Peter Frank