Orlando and the Tempest
Press Release
Orlando and the Tempest
121 Orchard Street, New York City
April 8 – May 9, 2020
Orlando and the Tempest is a series of new artificial life paintings by Joseph Nechvatal that indirectly addresses issues of gender fluidity within our tempestuous social-political times by imagining nonexistent scenes from the 1928 novel Orlando by Virginia Woolf (the story of an aristocratic young male poet who transforms into a woman overnight and lives for 300 years).
Storms have no gender and mean full-blow fluidity. In Orlando and the Tempest, an ambiguous Orlando figure is embedded into just such noisy chaotic grounds to the extent that normal figure/ground relationships more-or-less merge, playing elusively with what is seen, what is suggested, what is repressed, and what is desired. Though the issue of gender fluidity is culturally and politically topical, that pangender subject is nothing new to Nechvatal. In 2000, he exhibited artworks (with artist’s statements) investigating virtual hermaphrodite complexity in his ec-satyricOn 2000 exhibition, and again in his 2002 show vOluptuary: an algorithic hermaphornology. He has continued to use androgynous forms in his work, since. In 2018, he penned a pansexual art theory paper entitled Before and Beyond the Bachelor Machine that was published in Arts.
The pictures in the exhibition are created with custom C++ artificial life software, acrylic paint, and archival inkjet on Hahnemühle Cézanne canvas.