Alice Channer, Lucy Kim, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Ingrid Wiener at Lisa Cooley

Lisa Cooley presents a four-person exhibition exploring the mediation of human perception in the context of accelerated technological change.

Alice Channer’s  r o c k f a l l is a large-scale installation work made of small compact objects rendered in plaster, chromed aluminum, and resin. Alien-like, their movement across the space evokes a horizontal cascade or meteor shower. These forms were generated from a collection of concrete debris the artist gathered from active construction sites in London. Scanning these man-made rocks and then digitally elongating them, the final cast objects were rendered by a CNC machine, whose long, horizontal cut grooves are preserved in each object’s final shape. The artist uses distinct materials to suggest differing movements of time, distributing these temporalities across the space to stretch the viewer’s perception.

Lucy Kim’s Duck Duck Goose (Looking Glass, Looking Blue) uses stretching and distortion to investigate changing notions of human and “natural” life. The work consists of three panels each depicting an orange and its reflection in a mirror. While the surfaces of the first two panels were created from cast orange skin four times enlarged, the third panel’s surface is constituted by a four-times-enlarged human epidermis, complete with goosebumps. Equating these skins by zooming in to investigate their surfaces, the work envisions a perverse humanoid-organic ideal, satirizing new notions of embodiment brought forth by contemporary cosmetics advertising.

Since the late 1970s, Belgian musician and visual artist Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven has engaged human cognition and perception through a diverse output consisting of paintings, drawings, collages, computer animations, installations, and zines. Van Kerckhoven’s works Backwards(2000) and Cumulator (2004) are part of an ongoing series of animations which deal with female bodies (often drawn from pornographic sources) caught from within chaotic virtual environments. In Backwards one finds figure and ground becoming fused, the body in effect melting or dissolving into its surroundings. In Cumulator, however, the environment appears as a form of consciousness itself, a center of activity flooded in hypothetical pathways and states of being.

Between 1974 and 1997, Ingrid Wiener and Dieter Roth—and also, initially, Valie Export—collaborated on a series of hand-woven tapestries. Instigated by Wiener and Export, the artists took up weaving as a way to address perception and its subjectivities in a manually-produced and technically repetitive medium. The weaving process itself later grew to include performative constraints issued by Roth, which Wiener would in turn interpret, often resulting in representations of perceptual shifts rendered across the considerable time span required to produce each work.

Wiener’s own tapestries on view in this exhibition—Dr. Müllers Cable Spring (2009-2010) and Homing in on Bayes (2013-2015)—summon a dystopic vision of technology through an equation of weaving with binary coding. Homing in on Bayes, for example, reproduces formulae from the mathematician Thomas Bayes, whose eponymous theorem is integral to the prediction of an artificial intelligence beyond human understanding and survival.