Reception and artist’s talk: “Yestermorrow”
- on 25 Feb 2011
- Carlos Gallery, Nabit Art Building
Solo exhibition of video installation and digital prints by Jessica Irish, Assistant Professor of Design & Technology and the Director of Academic Affairs for the School of Art, Media & Technology at Parsons, The New School for Design, New York.
In this new series, Irish explores the increasingly vast network of global production and consumption that silently churns away in the distant background of our everyday lives. Unlike today's raging headlines of volatile GDP rates, trade imbalances, economic and environmental catastrophe, Yestermorrow captures the undulating rhythm intrinsic to the physical apparatus of the global economy. By juxtaposing the byproducts of yesterday to the promise of tomorrow, Yestermorrow conjures in-between spaces and states that are at once familiar yet estranged.
Throughout the multimedia pieces that form Yestermorrow, the hypnotic motion of works present a stark landscape of cyclical surrender to forces that be. Human interaction appears oddly listless, slightly comical and very much anonymous within infrastructure of global capitalism. Calculations of personal fortitude and collective will appear drown out of the repetitive, seemingly unbroken functionality of today's globalism. Shot from various locations worldwide - Shanghai, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Berlin, New York and Los Angeles - Yestermorrow construes an ungrounded reality at odds with the booster propagation of "advanced" and "growth" economies.
Irish is an Assistant Professor of Design & Technology and the Director of Academic Affairs for the School of Art, Media & Technology at Parsons, The New School for Design. Her design research focuses on the application of dynamic media to empower communities through collaborative information mapping and non-linear storytelling. Current design projects include DataMYNE and Urban Research Tool. She has previously taught at Wellesley College, UCLA, UCSB and was the founding principle of OnRamp Arts, an award-winning digital arts non-profit in central Los Angeles that produced innovative new media projects in collaboration with local communities and artists.