Vellum LA presents:
NANCY BAKER CAHILL
SLIPSTREAM: TABLE OF CONTENTS
Opening Reception:
Thursday, September 15, 7-9 PM
On View at Vellum LA:
September 16 - October 16, 2022
Vellum LA
7673 Melrose Ave
Los Angeles CA 90046
Vellum LA is thrilled to announce SLIPSTREAM: TABLE OF CONTENTS, Nancy Baker Cahill’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Curated by Alice Scope and Sinziana Velicescu, Baker Cahill’s exhibition features ten new works from her Slipstream series on Vellum’s state-of-the-art LED Luma Canvases. The exhibition will include an inaugural summit, Web3: How It's Going, curated and organized by Postreality Labs' Jesse Damiani, Vellum LA, and Nancy Baker Cahill. The collection will be minted with NFT.storage on proof of stake Ethereum.
“I want an invented truth.”
- Clarice Lispector, Água Viva
Baker Cahill’s series title springs from the fiction genre called “Slipstream,” which deals in "the familiar strange or the strange familiar.” In her Slipstream series, Baker Cahill mediates the genre with visual art created using the tools of digital simulation.
Ten video artworks, presented as nine abstract “chapters,” with a final “about the author,” speak a visual language of mutation and untrustworthy translation. As misinformation continues to drive conversations about invented truths and how they can be weaponized, the artist recognized a deeper thread. The contemporary condition has only scratched the surface of the ways in which this force will impact culture, politics, and personhood in the future. Baker Cahill approaches the practices and technologies of web3, which are entangled in conversations of power, decentralization, and value, to further explore the epistemological process of truth making (and destroying).
Slipstream artworks begin as graphite drawings on paper, launching a long odyssey of production. The drawings are torn into pieces and then reconfigured in bespoke sculptural configurations. Echoing recombinant DNA, each sculptural installation represents an iterative version of the one before. Documented as 3D objects, they are altered, lit, and animated using CG software. The drawing sculptures form shifting landscapes and subjects, glistening as they breathe, expand, and contract. In some videos, Baker Cahill includes brief textual collaborations with the AI engine GPT-3, to further blur and layer her creative intentions. Once composited, they exist as discrete looped videos. Additive and subtractive in their construction, these transmutations embody a self-organizing logic. Information is lost and gained as the drawings journey through the software that supports their new incarnations. As digital animations they reckon with the core question of the Ship of Theseus; what, after version upon version, remains of the original? Inspired by pre-cinematic cave painting, drawing, and entangled human and botanical life, the videos reveal the analog technology of drawing, blurring its origins with dazzling pixels. These artworks gesture towards the organic, as entirely simulated fictions. Hybridity is the beating heart of the changeling artworks, inviting conversations about what is real, what is alive, and what we see and feel when digital/analog boundaries are blurred.
In partnership with NFT.storage, powered by IPFS and Filecoin, Baker Cahill also presents this exhibition opportunity to address the question of longevity, conservation, and safeguarding of NFTs as part of the larger canon of art history. As the artist’s Slipstream works question truth and information around power, decentralization, and value, the natural question to follow is: how do we ensure NFTs as an artform are stored ethically for the future and the history of the medium? For this exhibition, all ten of Baker Cahill’s NFT works will be stored via Filecoin, and made available over IPFS, a peer-to-peer distributed network protocol, to make a more efficient and secure web. By allowing anyone to participate as a storage provider and truly decentralizing access for its users, Filecoin creates a decentralized, efficient, and robust foundation for humanity's information.
About Nancy Baker Cahill
Nancy Baker Cahill is a new media artist who examines systemic power, selfhood, and embodied consciousness through drawing and shared immersive space. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free Augmented Reality (AR) art platform exploring resistance and inclusive creative expression.
Her geolocated AR installations have been exhibited globally and have earned her profiles in the New York Times, Frieze Magazine, and The Art Newspaper, among other publications, and she was included in ARTnews’ list of 2021 'Deciders'. Her work has been exhibited internationally at museums and galleries, including Francisco Carolinum Linz, The Hermitage, The Buk-Seoul Museum of Art (SEMA), Honor Fraser Gallery, and König Gallerie. In 2022, she was one of two featured artists in the Luma Foundation's Elevation 1049 Biennial in Switzerland. Her work was featured in the Immersive Main Competition at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival and on 90+ screens in Times Square for the entire month of July as part of the Midnight Moments program.
Baker Cahill was an artist scholar in the Berggruen Institute’s inaugural Transformations of the Human Fellowship, and a 2021 resident at Oxy Arts’ ‘Encoding Futures,’ focused on AR monuments. She is a TEDx speaker and a member of the Guild of Future Architects. In 2021, she was awarded the Williams College Bicentennial Medal of Honor and received a C.O.L.A. Master Artist Fellowship. She is a 2022 LACMA Art and Tech Grant recipient.
About NFT.Storage
NFT.Storage provides free decentralized storage and bandwidth for NFTs on IPFS and Filecoin. NFT.Storage aims to be the largest internet archive for NFTs by making storage fully decentralized, publically accessible, and free. Backed by Protocol Labs and powering the world's largest NFT marketplaces, NFT.Storage's mission is to be the "Internet Archive" for NFTs - making the storage and access of NFTs (from all ecosystems) a public commons.
About Filecoin
Filecoin, the world's largest decentralized storage network, enables users to store, request, and transfer data via a verifiable marketplace. Filecoin's advanced technology provides a robust foundation to store the world's most valuable datasets. An alternative to costly cloud storage, the Filecoin network offers efficiently priced and geographically decentralized storage, minimizing financial barriers and allowing users to take advantage of its unmatched network capabilities. Filecoin is completely open source, enabling people from all over the world to participate.
About IPFS
IPFS is a peer-to-peer network and protocol designed to make the web faster, safer, and more open. IPFS upgrades the web to work peer to peer, addressing data by what it is instead of where it’s located on the network, or who is hosting it.
