Wednesday Web Artist of the Week: Alexandra Gorczynski. Philadelphia-based artist Alexandra Gorczynski was one of the early stars of the new wave of digital art. Her work bridged the gap between “Tumblr” culture and fine art and helped set a precedent for the aesthetic obsessions of the scene that are still being mined today. Her education in fine art painting is clearly evident in the construction of her pieces. There is a subtle and precise attention to detail as well as a distinct subversive wit that elevates her compositions to distinctly classical levels. Says the artist: My work matured around the time when the internet's influence over visual experience felt more powerful than ever.
Untitled \\\///\\\///, 2015, 2 archival pigment prints, 5 embedded video screens. The fact that Gorczynski was at the vanguard of the contemporary new media movement means she has a vital perspective on the changing scene: Net art has gone from being a subversive phenomenon to a commercialized set of aesthetics. Illuminated Crescent, 2015. Past-Meets-Internet in Alexandra Gorczynski's New Works. Still from Cultivated Nature, Alexandra Gorczynski, 2015. All images and materials via NewHive An eye-catchy amalgam of art-from-the-past photographs, fused perfectly with animated flowers, fields, and even butterflies emerges in Landscape Paintings, a NewHive-based project by Alexandra Gorczynski. All this, brightened up with a few subtle symbols related to the artist's condition in society, demonstrates the Philadelphia-based new media artist's deep knowledge of and strong interest in history, as well as her sense of aesthetics and composition, merging meaningful classical artworks and architectures with both organic and digital elements.
Mostly imagined while recently exploring the Chateau de Versailles, these poetic, almost nostalgic, digital landscapes depict a fascinating, fleeting, and ambiguous space that offers viewers a chance to explore a smooth symbiotic environment between the real and virtual spheres. GIF of Inside the Living Walls, Alexandra Gorczynski, 2015 Related: After dark.
From Virtual Wallpapers to Emoji Gardens, We Explored Digital Art at Miami Art Week. Hypersalon – Claudia Matté + Daniel Tempkins + Alma Allaro When the art world headed south for its annual beachside getaway, the young but tightly-knit digital arts community took advantage of the migration: day by day, slowly gaining traction in the world of contemporary art, a handful of cutting-edge practices made waves at Art Basel Miami this past weekend. Alternative, satellite, and parallel fairs, like PULSE, NADA, Untitled, and new models, including Hypersalon, benefited from the ambient turmoil, bringing forth digital-based artworks that introduced emerging practices to both large audiences and contemporary art collectors.
Over the warm December weekend, The Creators Project explored many of the different spaces showcasing the impressive digital creations. Here's a brief overview of the artwork that made us tick: Held underneath PULSE's massive tent, PULSE-Play caught our attention right away. From Alexandra Gorczynski's After Dark, via NewHive Hypersalon - Rick Silva Related: At Art Basel, A Collector Just Bought This URL For $5,000. Down in Miami, celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Combs are flocking to spend their cumulative millions on contemporary works of art, from Picasso to Keith Haring. One of those pieces snatched up at one of the many satellite fairs by an undisclosed buyer on Thursday was by an artist named Alexandra Gorczynski, which ordinarily isn't all that surprising.
But what Gorczynski's camp sold isn’t a painting, or a sculpture, or even what one might consider a traditional installation. It is a digital piece of multimedia hosted on a URL, smokeinmirrors.net. Its selling price, purportedly the first of its kind at a major international art festival, is $5,000. "After Dark," pictured below on the right, was created and presented on the art-sharing platform NewHive. "After Dark" was displayed on a screen in an exhibition by Zhulong Gallery at PULSE art fair, which decided to feature the piece alongside a collection of Gorczynski’s other prints. Inside Alexandra Gorczynski's $5,000 Art Website, 'After Dark' From Alexandra Gorczynski's After Dark. Images courtesy the artist New media artist Alexandra Gorczynski is known for net art that obliterates lines between the fine and digital art forms.
After Dark, her first collection for DIY publishing platform NewHive, sold for $5,000 at Gorczynski's Zhulong Gallery exhibition at the PULSE Art Fair during Miami Art Week. Howard and Zhulong didn't make the buyer's name public, but noted the person is a well-respected contemporary art collector. After Dark is still globally accessible to anyone with Internet access at smokeinmirrors.net, however, and Howard has said that the collector will give After Dark physical incarnation—a screen running the webpage—public exhibition opportunities. After Dark is a blend of video, photographs, and digital painting informed by Gorczynski's background in painting. So what rules govern the sales of artworks like After Dark? And what might appeal to collectors interested in radical new forms of art ownership?
PLUR Piece. YouTube. All New Everything: Alexandra Gorczynski at TRANSFER Gallery. TRANSFER, Brooklyn’s latest addition to the www-to-AFK gallery space experiment, opened its doors last weekend with a solo show by Alexandra Gorczynski. Steadily exhibiting several times a year, the artist created all new work for “Truisms.” Standouts? A particularly likable canvas of flirty eyes and digital strokes, a classical visual of female anatomy with a smiley face mashed over vag and an epic, painted, pink and purple full-wall “desktop” mural with works as “icons” titled “painty.jpg” and related misc. [Here, the author of this post spends several minutes typing and redacting words like "sexy" and angrily grumbling at herself.] There’s a lot of confrontational talk about gender balance in net art and gendered net stuff in general, but there’s nothing wrong about vibing off pretty aesthetics. This art is attractive. That’s good. When asked to explain her work by the L Magazine, Gorczynski called it “sincere and emotional new-media folk art” which fits.