New Contact | Eileen Isagon Skyers
February 3 – 23, 2015 | Littman Gallery
Reception: Wednesday, February 4, 2015 | 5–8pm
Curated by Will Elder
New Contact demonstrates the intricacies and contradictions that determine human expression across networked space. The digital agora of pure circulation and image saturation affects both autonomy and tactility at once. While the interface was originally conceived as something radically different from everyday life, it is instead heavily implicated in everyday life. It introduces new urgencies that constantly segment our experiences; it has essentially been subsumed into the phenomenological texture of things. HD is now unremarkably present on every storefront.
This exhibition employs a compendium of restrained poetics and materials to quietly declare the paradox of much defining today’s information culture: the assimilation of memory into data, form into format, emotion into insular venting, and image into unidimensional JPEG. Its varied textures and compartmentalized narratives come together in effort to reclaim the earnest, the personal, the local.
Eileen Isagon Skyers is an avid proponent of media histories and master graduate in Critical Theory and Creative Research at Pacific Northwest College of Art. She completed a B.A. in Philosophy and a B.A. in Studio Art with a Minor in Art History from the University of South Florida in 2012. Skyers has worked within several contemporary art and non-profit arts organizations, among them, the USF Contemporary Art Museum, The Wassaic Project in Brooklyn, New York, and the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Her moving-image work has been exhibited both locally and internationally in streaming festivals and galleries alike. Skyers continues to broaden her art and research practice, primarily investigating the movement of image cultures on the web.