Digital Expressionism : Organized by Ben Wolf Noam

The Suzanne Geiss Company
76 Grand Street
New York, NY

Digital Expressionism, featuring works by Ben Wolf Noam, Greg Parma Smith, and Korakrit Arunanondchai, explored the half-life of material art objects in an age dominated by digital forms.  Digital Expressionism was s organized by Ben Wolf Noam.

 Digital tools can both mimic material phenomena and become art historical reference points. These three artists trace image manipulation devices like paint-brush, gradient, and alpha-mask to produce works that translate emerging vocabularies of digital image production back into analog painting and sculpture.

Arunanondchai, Parma Smith, and Wolf Noam explored questions about the heroic artist and the universality of expression:

- Is the laptop hermit heir to the Modernist ingénue?
- Is the blackbox of technology today’s eccentric genius?
- Does algorithmic precision realize or relegate the promise of a common visual language?

 In search of answers, the gallery was transformed into a temple for the digital age by Wolf Noam’s series of 15-foot gradient-painted columns. Arunanondchai builds a stage from manipulated denim that fuses networks of global commerce, fashion, and spectacle. On the stage, a HD video “Painting with History in a room filled with men with funny names 2” plays. Parma Smith’s oil painting of original graffiti calls up cultural references that point to his own artistic identity.

 Physical elements of lived scale, personal history, and expressive gesture fuse with digital processes and aesthetics. The formal strategies and material consequences of digital manipulation emerge: compression, transposition, and texture-mapping become physical, personal, emotional, (and vice versa) in our artists’ varied, networked pursuits.

A multimedia performance series tied the installation with similar themes explored in dance, performance art, music, and film punctuated the exhibition.

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