Below are images from my March 2019 California Institute of the Arts thesis exhibition in the Lime Gallery.
The Dadabyte Theater explores the relationship between body and technology, utilizing portraiture and more recently sculpture and 16mm film to engage in questions of our technological entanglement.
So much love and gratitude to all who attended my reception (several missing here photographically) and everyone who stopped by to see the show!
Thank you to Gordon Kurowski, Theraminist, for his mesmerizing performance during the reception.
Front view of the gallery space
"Self-Driving Car" kinetic sculpture
“After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of [hu]man[kind]—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media….Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex.” –W. Terrence Gordon on Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Here's a short (low-res) clip of "Self-Driving Car" in motion with 16mm freeway footage projected onto the kinetic sculpture.
I collaborated with Simon Gulergun who shot the wonderful 16mm footage of the 110 freeway (aka the Arroyo Seco Parkway) in Highland Park where I grew up which was also the first freeway in the Western United States. My best pal Mindy O'Brien and her father, Terry Allen are driving their 69 Volkswagen Beetle in the footage. Terry devised a special rotary mechanism for this 52" penny-farthing high-wheel allowing it to rotate. Attached to the wheel are dye-sublimation prints on metal of my head and feet.
Thank you Simon, Terry, and Mindy for all your assistance with the piece!
Next up is a new figural sculptural piece which is a memoir of sorts, referencing not only my own personal history but part of women’s history. I collaborated with my talented pal Tony Candelaria in its fabrication. Tal Katz made the steel armature giving extra strength to the 1912 batwing typewriter bustle, Eddie Trigueros assisted in pressing photograms and Christy Kane sewed the black velvet and gold fringed valance to allude to the presence of a proscenium stage.
Enormous thanks to everyone involved with this piece and the exhibition overall, I couldn’t have done it without you!
•110 gelatin silver fiber photogram prints
•Gold leaf papier-mâché bust, sculpted from a 1880s wasp waist dress form
•1912 batwing typewriter
•1940s telephone switchboard operator headset
•Rotary phone dial
•Rotary phone speakers
•16mm film
•Film reels
•Vinyl records
•VHS tapes
•Enlarger lens
•Enlarger bellows
•Thomas collector's edition reproduction radio
Sketch of the gallery layout by Eddie Trigueros
1880s French wasp waist dress form which was used as a guide for the papier-mâché bust.
Some behind-the-scenes, making of...
Making of a rotary phone headpiece for my new in-camera self-portrait with Eddie and Tony who assisted with its fabrication.
"Communication Tower" © Brandy Trigueros 2019
Gallery view of my two framed 44" x 63" pigment prints
Terry Allen and I during installation weekend.
Stef Choi, the most adorable painting goddess you ever did see!
Gordon Kurowski warming up for his wonderful theremin performance.
Deinstall day...so thankful for Eddie for all his hard work and everyone involved with making the show a successful one!
Thank you also to Ian Mitchell for his graphic design work.
