The newest exhibition at Sullivan Goss brings together three fascinating contemporary artists with imperfectly overlapping agendas, but whose works set out different rules of engagement with the future. Two are explicitly technological in orientation, dealing with historical mediums in unconventional ways. They foreground the ascendancy of our digital paradigm with its resulting surge of ever brighter, ever more vivid, ever higher-resolution digital displays. CHRIS PETERS and ALVARO MAESTRO entertain a certain nostalgia for older modes of information transmission, even as they employ cutting edge digital technology in their artistic processes. AUSTIN McCORMICK, on the other hand, is a skeptic of the whole affair. His work is explicitly analog. He makes process-driven abstractions, but they share formal similarities with the kind of generative aesthetics of cutting-edge A.I.s, where one shape suggests another until a space is filled. McCormick’s works remain leery of technology’s encroachment on both nature and art.
In grammar, the future imperfect tense asks: what will we be doing? In 2026 or even 2036, what will we be doing to make art? Future Imperfect brings together three distinct answers.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
CHRIS PETERS is a polymath. He’s a painter and a film maker, but he also dabbles in electrical engineering. Sullivan Goss represents him. His newest series of paintings have the same aspect ratio and formal conventions as a noir pulp novel from the mid-twentieth century, minus the typographic title. The imagery is developed through A.I. prompts before he paints it in oil on linen. What stories do they tell? The titles are suggestive: Thinking of You, The Defiant One, The Art Dealer. His engagement with historical media via new technologies extends to a special presentation of the artist’s Nipkow Televisor, a primitive form of television screen in which a moving image is created by colored lights shining through a spinning disk. With help from Anthropic’s Claude A.I., rapid prototyping available online, and inspiration from YouTube, the artist was able to engineer a super-primitive motion picture display which was first developed almost a century ago. His Nipkow camera will also be on display, allowing visitors to witness technical wizardry in the service of art. The miracle of capturing and transmitting moving images is thrown back into sharp relief.
ALVARO MAESTRO trained as an architect at the Polytechnic University of Valencia and at the University of Pennsylvania before embarking on a career as an architect and designer. Early on, he worked for Copenhagen’s powerhouse firm, Bjarke Ingels Group, before beginning his artistic career. His Loading Series is deceptive. Low-resolution pixelated images (an iconic form of the digital age) are rendered with near infinite patience in black pen and ink on heavy white paper. The images he sources are art-historical: Edward Muybridge’s important stop motion photographs of a galloping horse, a photograph from the moon landing, Grant Wood’s American Gothic. The virtuosity is there, but it is hidden in a patchwork of monochrome squares. With augmented reality software on your phone or iPad, these square-scapes turn into 3D urban landscapes. A pair of classical sculptures - Michelangelo’s David and the Venus de Milo - are likewise made into “low-res” tabletop sculptures. The translation tries to reconcile the primacy of the digital with the power of historical art.
AUSTIN McCORMICK just completed his M.F.A. at U.C.S.B. More than a decade separated his undergraduate and graduate degrees, during which time he honed his craft and worked in a variety of positions in the entertainment and fine art industries, including a teaching stint at Art Center College of Design, where he graduated as valedictorian from the illustration program. Austin’s body of work involves painting, drawing, collage, and even sculpture. Density of shape and color is a throughline of the whole enterprise. In the largest painting that will be shown, abstract shapes that suggest baroque passages of light to dark, chaotic botanicals, and even calligraphy create a jungle thicket of a composition. Is it all advancing or receding? Or both? His sculptures, meanwhile, are constructed from a combination of materials assembled into forms that suggest natural growth and decay. The gallery is excited to host his first post-graduate gallery presentation
