Reviews

Erin Gee To the Sooe exhibition image

Review of solo exhibition – Canadian Art

To the Sooe” is my first solo exhibition in a major Canadian institution, curated by Tak Pham at the MacKenzie Art Gallery . I am happy to announce the exhibition was recently reviewed by artist and curator Lauren Fournier and published in Canadian Art. This is my first solo exhibition in a major Canadian institution and I am thrilled by the positive response from critics.  The exhibition closed early due to COVID-19, which is noted elegantly by the reviewer:

“Erin Gee’s “To The Sooe” reflects on the valences of emotional life in a post-internet world, gesturing to the many resonances between humans and machines in a time when the humanity of algorithms, data and screens might seem at odds with the complexities of feeling. Having visited the exhibition just weeks before the gallery’s temporary closure due to COVID-19 physical distancing measures, I am now struck by how prescient the work is in this moment of quarantine and self-isolation, when, for most of us, our primary means of communication, intimacy, and connection with others is through technology.”- Lauren Fournier

Click below to read the full review on Canadian Art.

Erin Gee

Review: Akimblog, Canada

The first review for my solo exhibition To the Sooe at the MacKenzie Art Gallery is here!  To the Sooe is on view until April 19th in Regina, Canada.

“Gee delivers the output in ASMR style through role play and a sound performance that leave you both mesmerized and tingling to your core. The sterile white walls and scientific jargon of the exhibition texts should not deter you from this immersive and sensory experience. Gee’s complex communication configurations require your time, patience and an open mind.” -Alexa Heenan, Akimblog

Click here to read the full review

Book: Robotic Imaginary

My robotic artwork Swarming Emotional Pianos is featured in image and text on p 131-132 of Jennifer Rhee’s newly published book: The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor (2018, University of Minnesota Press).  The image above is just a photo of me relaxing with a coffee as I read the first few pages…

This amazing book details AI from a perspective that is driven by emotion and humanity, while referencing the work and the influence of women and poc in a way I haven’t seen before. I found myself constantly thinking: yes, yes as I read the book!

 

From the official description of the book:

The word robot—introduced in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R.—derives from rabota, the Czech word for servitude or forced labor. A century later, the play’s dystopian themes of dehumanization and exploited labor are being played out in factories, workplaces, and battlefields. In The Robotic Imaginary, Jennifer Rhee traces the provocative and productive connections of contemporary robots in technology, film, art, and literature. Centered around the twinned processes of anthropomorphization and dehumanization, she analyzes the coevolution of cultural and technological robots and artificial intelligence, arguing that it is through the conceptualization of the human and, more important, the dehumanized that these multiple spheres affect and transform each other.

Drawing on the writings of Alan Turing, Sara Ahmed, and Arlie Russell Hochschild; such films and novels as Her and The Stepford Wives; technologies like Kismet (the pioneering “emotional robot”); and contemporary drone art, this book explores anthropomorphic paradigms in robot design and imagery in ways that often challenge the very grounds on which those paradigms operate in robotics labs and industry. From disembodied, conversational AI and its entanglement with care labor; embodied mobile robots as they intersect with domestic labor; emotional robots impacting affective labor; and armed military drones and artistic responses to drone warfare, The Robotic Imaginary ultimately reveals how the human is made knowable through the design of and discourse on humanoid robots that are, paradoxically, dehumanized.

 

Click here to view more information on the book at University of Minnesota Press

 

Laughing Web Dot Space at Yards Gallery, Chicago. Photo: Micki Harris

Scapi Magazine Chicago

My interactive sound art website Laughing Web Dot Space was featured in a very thoughtful review of the Entanglements exhibition curated by Chelsea Welch and Iryne Roh of Her Environment, and on exhibit at the Yards Gallery in Chicago in January-February 2019.

“Now that we’re all agreed that harassment is no laughing matter, let’s stop by Erin Gee’s #metoo resonant Laughing Web Dot Spacea virtual “laugh-in” featuring survivors of sexual violence. Attendees were invited to don headphones and listen to an overlapping chorus of victims laughing and/or contribute (anonymously) their own laughter. The maxim “Question your laughter”  came to mind, as I thought of both the violent and cathartic valences of joining in laughter. My favorite element of this installation was the way it built in consent, in the form of a STOP button. “

-NOA/H FIELDS

 

For the full review of the show, click here

Review: Canadian Art

Amber Berson wrote a thoughtful review on the occasion of Eastern Bloc’s 10th anniversary exhibition Amplification that features discussion and images of my first internet-artwork https://laughingweb.space

This exhibition meant a lot to me as an artist that has been supported by Eastern Bloc over the years not only by the fact that they have exhibited me and involved me in many projects…but also I have been enriched an supported by their fantastic programming.  I salute Eastern Bloc and wish them all the best in their next 10 years!

To read the article, click here.

Review in Canadian Art

I really appreciate this article by Tatum Dooley for Canadian Art on the Worldbuilding exhibition curated by John G Hampton and Maiko Tanaka at Trinity Square Video. My work Project H.E.A.R.T. which highlights VR and emotions made with Alex M Lee is featured, among other great works by Jeremy Bailey Kristen D Schaffer Eshrat Erfanian and Yam Lau.  Following is an excerpt from the article:

“The gamification of our bodies renders the physical form void, replaced by screens where our bodies and emotions can be morphed and manipulated. Perhaps the only way to create art with technology as advanced and recent as VR is to reckon with its potential consequences.

Gee’s project, the most realized out of the four artists in the exhibition, masters this reckoning. I spoke with Gee in the lead-up to the exhibition, and she explained the conceptual backbone of the piece. “I’m working through questions of emotional sincerity when it comes to self-help. In theory, if you can technologically master your emotions, if you can just make yourself excited, then you can make yourself a better, happier person. I don’t know how sincere that is…”

Click on the link below for the full article.

VR and the Failure of Self-Help Technology

In general, I feel very proud of this work but also very exhausted by it.  Through the project I’ve been working through the relationship between pop music and war, self help and sincerity, and ultimately I’m working through these issues of technique and technology in how life and trauma comes to us.  During the panel for the exhibition, there was a question of whether I was “pro-war”, and it’s one that I have received a few times in facebook messages from curious friends from far away.  The project is complex and difficult to read because I think it has to be.  It reflects my own mediatized understanding of international conflict, maybe my own frustration at my lack of understanding.

The best I can understand war is how it is mediated to me: through video games and news cycles, through abstract discussions on the radio. The goal of this project was never to address the terror and complexity of geopolitical conflict, but rather, to propose a psychedelic pop culture mirror, imagining a video game ruled not by characters that espouse self-righteous violence and grit, but technologically manipulated empathy and enthusiasm.  This game fails to address war in the same way that all technologically mediated attempts to do so fail to address war.  I also am also dissatisfied at the idea of an artistic protest that makes a cartoonish, morally didactic utopia where rainbows and love shoot out of guns instead of flesh-tearing bullets. I think the answer about the politics of this game lie in the end screen: an abstract screen that confronts you with statistics of death and trauma as a result of the battle itself.  I don’t think there is a way to win the game.

Erin Gee - Rhubarb, rhubarb, peas and carrots

Rhubarb, rhubarb, peas and carrots

Rhubarb, rhubarb, peas and carrots, Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina SK), July 17-September 5, 2015. Review in National Gallery of Canada Magazine

Essay by G. Douglas Barrett: Echoes of Narcissus, Erin Gee’s “Voice of Echo”

By G. Douglas Barrett, 2011

My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms.

—Metamorphosis, Ovid

Presented as the centrepiece of Erin Gee’s exhibition at Contrary Projects is the artist’s work for single channel video, Voice of Echo: Song of Love for Technological Eyes (2011). A viewer is confronted with a portrait view of the artist staring directly into the camera while solemnly donning a white latex head garment, a cap which covers her head and appears to extend to cover some of her lower neck. Sternly, though in a thoroughly relaxed manner, Gee begins to pull small objects from her mouth—miniature circular mirrors varying somewhat in size—and attaches each of them to her face. Eventually the artist’s face becomes nearly entirely covered with the small reflective surfaces, each resting at a different angle and reflecting presumably light from inside the artist’s studio. Occasionally bits of her own body are visible in the mirrors—a glimpse of the underside of a finger, for instance, as she finishes affixing one of the circular surfaces. At other times it’s unclear exactly what is reflected in the tiny mirrors: Do we see more revealed of the artist’s studio, a view of the video camera, or, if only for a split-second, perhaps a momentary fragment of my own image as viewer?

While nominally invoking Echo, the musical nymph found in Greek mythology who looses all ability to speak except for the imitation of the speech of others, Gee’s video clearly refers to both main characters in Ovid’s tale of Echo and Narcissus. Voice of Echo: Song of Love for Technological Eyes: Gee’s title contains at least a couple of non-sequiturs: the voice of a mute character; a song which is silent intended only for the eyes. The small mirrors we see in the video perform a role that is both reflective and yet foreclosing. Foreclosing in the way in which the performer’s face is gradually masked, converted from an object of the viewer’s gaze to an object which reflects it’s own state of technological mediation.

Further still, the mirrors point to video art’s alleged “narcissist” history, its mode of hermetic “self-absorption,” which “enclose[s] the body between two machines, camera and monitor.”(1) In discussing seminal video works of the 1970s such as Vito Acconci’s 1971 work Centers—in which the artist stands with his forefinger outstretched pointing to the center of the video frame—art historian Rosalind Krauss comes one breath away from positing narcissism as “the condition of the entire genre” of video art.(2) Of course Krauss was writing this in 1970 when the widespread use of video technologies gave to physicality the novel dimension of teleportive mobility. When bodies gained the ability to move freely through space and time, art seemed to have shifted its focus from the referential category of the icon to the phenomenal—the “here-and-now,” present quality of the body. Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror (1975) and John Cage’s famous silent piece 4’33” (1952) are two examples of this aesthetic presence. The latter presents the “bare essentials” of a (musical) performance scenario, while the former involves the reflexive component of Graham’s phenomenological descriptions of his own gesticulations and the observations of spectators as he stares at their reflections. Perhaps a more direct counterpart to Graham’s work is Joan Jonas’s Mirror Piece of 1970 in which the artist used body-sized mirrors to convert individual audience members into momentary spectacle, thereby turning the performer/audience relation on its head. These works stand as historical “presence works” par excellence.

The issue now, however, is that not only have the categories of icon and phenomenal presence been shown as doubly embedded—the icon contains its own presence, while the phenomenal functions iconically—but what it means to simply be present in contemporary life has been radically overturned through technology. In our digitally-mediated daily lives we are consistently both “here” and somewhere else. (I’m writing this essay while I check my Facebook, write an email, and think about doing laundry.) Presence is divided and multiple.

Over the course of Gee’s eighteen-minute performance the artist gradually “becomes” the icon of Narcissus and returns full circle to bare presence, all contained within the technological frame of video. Voice of Echo synthesizes the characters of Echo and Narcissus into a single body and enjoins the iconic with the physical. Gee’s video presences the body as technologized while marking it as signifying and gendered. Noting that Freud himself had located a majority of his examples of narcissism in women, writing in her classic essay titled after Narcissus’s feminine counterpart, philosopher Gayatri Spivak had intended to “give woman” (back) to Echo.(3) By virtue of a kind of synaesthetic remapping, Gee enacts a series of givings: icon to presence, sound to sight, Echo to Narcissus, image to music.

While in Gee’s work sound and vision are counterposed and crossed, music and image are presented as interconnected. In Voice of Echo, music works as an intermedial site, a nexus of interconnected media within which sound is present only as absent referent. (As we have learned from Cage, music does not need sound as such.) Sharing the medium of video, music and image are framed together as a single entity. As a mute song, Gee’s wordless performance refers to not only Echo’s inability to speak, but perhaps also to the historical expulsion of language from music, the modernist conception of music as absolute and autonomous. Not only does Gee’s video re-inscribe language into music, it argues for “the condition of the entire genre” of music (Echo) to include Narcissus (video) as well. Or perhaps Voice of Echo points to the always already entwinedness of the two media.

In addition to presenting Voice of Echo as a single-channel video installation, Gee presents (rough) sonifications—digital equivalents of synaesthesia—of the video track of Voice of Echo. Gallery visitors are provided with iPods containing several digital sound files, each track a unique drone texture, a set of “buzzy” soundscapes which generally change subtly, though occasionally jar the listener’s attention with a burst of noise. Also included on the iPods is “album art” created by further manipulating and translating the audio tracks into images that appear on each small iPod screen.

Gee’s use of the iPods is interesting. She explains a wish to “emphasize the [visitors’] technological bodies,” bodies forming a core of the socio-cultural exchange occurring within the context of an art exhibition. While the iPods by no means completely disrupt the normal ebb and flow of schmoozing, the digital playback devices remind us of the less than subtle solipsistic character of the contemporary musical experience: to each her own musical world. Think of a crowded subway. Each passenger sonically insulated from the crowd, isolated within her own “media universe.” The lowercase pronoun—Does the “i” in iPod stand for (mass) Individualism?—echoes Narcissus’s own turn away from the collective musical experience and, as though caught in a feedback loop, his endless fixation upon his own reflected image.

(1) Wagner, Anne M. “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence.” (p. 68). October, Vol. 91. (Winter (2000), pp. 59-80.

(2) Krauss, Rosalind. “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” (p. 50). October, Vol. 1. (Spring, 1976), pp. 50-64.

(3)Spivak, Gayatri C. “Echo.” (p. 17). New Literary History, Vol. 24, No. 1, Culture and Everyday Life. (Winter, 1993), pp. 17-43.

G DOUGLAS BARRETT is an artist, composer, and writer. Drawing equally from the contemporary gallery arts and the performing arts traditions, he has exhibited, performed, and published critical writings throughout North America and Europe. He has presented work at the Incubator Arts Project (New York), Diapason Gallery (New York), REDCAT (Los Angeles), the Wulf (Los Angeles), Theater Perdu (Amsterdam), Universität der Künste Berlin, Phoebe Zeitgeist Teatro (Milan), Galerie Mark Müller (Zürich), Université de Paris-Est Marne-La-Vallée, the Sonic Arts Research Centre (Belfast, UK), and Neutral Ground (Regina). In 2009 Barrett received a DAAD grant to Berlin. He has obtained advanced degrees from California Institute of the Arts (MFA, 2006) and a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His writings include essays published in the interdisciplinary literary journal Mosaic (University of Manitoba) and Contemporary Music Review, along with “A Text Score Manifesto,” in Word Events: Perspectives on Verbal Notation (John Lely and James Saunders, Eds., New York: Continuum, 2011).