April 13 – June 24, 2023
TILT Institute Main Gallery
Free To The Public
Contemporary X is an annual open call for artists to present a new body of work that advances the discourse of image-based practices in unique ways. This year the jury selected visual artists Liliana Farber and Allie Tsubota. There will be an opening reception Thursday, April 13 from 6-8pm RSVP Below! For more information about the artists and jurors, please visit the Contemporary X webpage.
Liliana Farber: Screen Blues
Screen Blues is a selection of work that explores the implications of living in a world drowning in data. The work derives from digital images of the ocean generated by Google Earth, a geographical information systems (GIS) platform that renders 3D representations based on pictures taken by satellites. Farber recontextualizes the images using several processes, such as open-source software, to expose the malleability of computational photography and complicate the relationship between fictional and real spaces, optical illusions, and data collections, calling into question our trust in GIS and the images they produce. As the virtual landscape becomes increasingly mediated by images, emptiness and artificiality remain.
Allie Tsubota: Dead Letter Room
Dead Letter Room is a transhistorical correspondence with the late Japanese poet Hara Tamiki (原民喜, 1905–1951), known for his slender output of poetry and prose during the prewar and immediate postwar periods. As witness to the rise of Japanese militarism and a survivor of atomic catastrophe, Hara was extraordinarily sensitive to the specular and spectral intimacies borne in the aftermath of transpacific war. Aggregating U.S. military archives from the postwar Pacific, original photographs of contemporary Japan, and a series of fabulative, epistolary texts, Dead Letter Room contends with the formation and arbitration of history, memory, spectatorship and language across transnational space and time.
