Slipstream: Table of Contents
A Nancy Baker Cahill Solo Exhibition

Slipstream: Table of Contents was Nancy Baker Cahill's first solo exhibition at the gallery, presenting ten new works from her Slipstream series on Luma Canvas LED displays. It was accompanied by a summit, Web3: How It's Going, organized by Jesse Damiani of Postreality Labs, Vellum LA, and the artist.

“I want an invented truth.” Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

The series title comes from the fiction genre known as slipstream, which deals in “the familiar strange or the strange familiar.” In Slipstream, Baker Cahill mediates the genre with visual art made using the tools of digital simulation.

Ten video works, presented as nine abstract chapters with a final “about the author,” speak a visual language of mutation and untrustworthy translation. As misinformation drives conversations about invented truths and how they can be weaponized, the artist recognized a deeper thread. Baker Cahill approaches the practices and technologies of Web3, entangled as they are in questions of power, decentralization, and value, to explore the epistemological process of making (and destroying) truth.

Each work begins as a graphite drawing on paper. The drawings are torn and reconfigured into sculptural arrangements, each an iterative version of the one before, echoing recombinant DNA. Documented as 3D objects, they are altered, lit, and animated in CG software, becoming shifting landscapes that glisten as they breathe, expand, and contract. Some include brief textual collaborations with the AI engine GPT-3. Information is lost and gained as the drawings move through the software, and the works reckon with the question of the Ship of Theseus: what, after version upon version, remains of the original? Inspired by cave painting, drawing, and entangled human and botanical life, the videos reveal the analog technology of drawing while blurring its origins. Hybridity is at the heart of the work, raising questions about what is real, what is alive, and what we see and feel when digital and analog boundaries blur.

In partnership with NFT.Storage, the exhibition also addressed the longevity and conservation of NFTs as part of the larger canon of art history. All ten works were stored via Filecoin and made available over IPFS, a peer-to-peer distributed network.

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 art platform exploring resistance and inclusive creative expression.

Her geolocated AR installations have been exhibited globally and profiled in the New York Times, Frieze, and The Art Newspaper, and she was named to ARTnews' 2021 Deciders list. She has exhibited at Francisco Carolinum Linz, The Hermitage, Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, Honor Fraser Gallery, and König Galerie. In 2022 she was one of two featured artists in the Luma Foundation's Elevation 1049 Biennial, was selected for the Immersive Main Competition at Tribeca, and showed on more than 90 screens in Times Square through Midnight Moments.

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. She received the Williams College Bicentennial Medal in 2021, a C.O.L.A. Master Artist Fellowship, and a 2022 LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant.