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Stephen Montoya
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Stephen Montoya
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Stephen Montoya
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Stephen Montoya
Screams can be heard coming from an old box computer monitor, now sideways, attached to a keyboard and small speaker on the second floor at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. A field of plastic debris fans out from what appears to be a point of contact on the floor where gravity pulled this once complete object into a fractured mess. On the screen, playing on a loop, is a pixelated video. But this object isn’t the casualty of a workplace accident, it’s part of a new exhibit at the museum entitled I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Age. This new exhibition, which will run from Feb. 12 – April 30, has taken two years to curate and features more than 60 works by 50 artists that include Andy Warhol, Hito Steyeri, and Gretchen Bender just to name a few.
The main theme of this exhibit is to examine the screen’s vast impact on art beginning in 1969, the same year of the Apollo moon landing, to the present. The artists included examine screen culture through a broad range of media such as paintings, sculpture, video games, digital art, augmented reality, and video.
Alison Hearst, curator at the MAMFW says this exhibition started during the pandemic.
“I was forced, as we all were during this time, to view life through screens,” she says. “For a while there the only we could interact with our colleagues and friends is with the mediation of a screen between us.”
Hearst says it was this daily reminder that inspired her to research to see how far back she could pinpoint where technology began to intertwine with art.
“For me it really starts in 1969, because that was the year of the televised Apollo moon landing and the release of ARPANET, which is the prototype to the internet,” she says. “This was really the first time that people were becoming more connected through screens … through new technologies. I mean 650 million people watch the moon landing, and that really marked the era when television, or screens, became a major part of our homelife.”
According to Hearst, it during this era of time that artist began using the media of the screen to create new digitally inspired work.
One such art installation on display for this exhibition is titled “TV Buddha” by artist Nam June Paik.
“Paik is considered the father of video art and started working with camcorders as early as 1965,” she says. “What I think is really amazing about this piece is he is combing this 18th century sculpture of the Buddha, with the cutting-edge technology of the time.”
This art installment shows the Buddha statue facing its own image on a closed-circuit TV, creating what Hearst calls a “closed loop echo chamber.” “I think this piece really hits upon the vanity of modern social media.”
Another art piece on display for this exhibit that really conveys the banal and meta of everyday life is an art installment of over 150,000 photographs that take up the entire center wall of the second floor of the museum. This piece, entitled “Thousand Little Brothers v7” was artist Hasan Elahi’s way of getting back at the FBI when they targeted him as a terrorist post 9/11.
“I was taken in by INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) after returning to the U.S. post 9/11 which began a 6-month long investigation by the FBI, where I had to justify my existence,” Elahi says. “So, I figured, why not help them out and decided to monitor myself for the benefit of the FBI.”
Elahi says in order to achieve this goal he began taking photos of his everyday life to chronicle where he was and what he was doing.
“I took pictures of the food I was eating, the toilets I was using and some of the beds I had been sleeping in,” he says. “When I started this project over twenty years ago, people would look at me funny for getting out my camera and taking photo of what I was eating and now it just so normalized.”
Hearst reiterated that this is the largest group of artist to ever display a themed work at the same time in the museum’s history.
For more information about the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth click here.
