FALL 2003 EXHIBITION "PROMISE OF PROGRESS"
featuring large-scale digital prints by David Wilcox
and video installation by Greg Niemeyer, Chris Chafe,
Christine Liu and Lorenzo Wang

Artists:

Greg Niemeyer

Christine Liu

Chris Chafe

Lorenzo Wang

David Wilcox

Curator's Statement:
Austin Museum of Digital Art's (AMODA) Exhibition for the Fall 2003
presents local Austin artist David Wilcox and Berkeley-based conceptual artist and UC Berkeley Assistant Professor Greg Niemeyer. The exhibition features two installations of Wilcox's large scale digital prints, and Niemeyer's video projection installation entitled "Organum." This digital animation was created in collaboration with Chris Chafe, Professor of Music at Stanford University and Niemeyer's former students Christine Liu and Lorenzo Wang. A collection of stills from the piece is also shown.

Wilcox's body of work includes a focus on digitally manipulated photography, culminating in large scale digital prints. His work has been featured in several exhibitions, including the 1999 Boston CyberArts Festival. His current series "Hamburger Landscapes" investigates the relationship between the early American landscape and the contemporary social landscape.

Niemeyer's work addresses scientific realities of bio-technological evolution and integrates these concepts and theories into aesthetic art forms. His work is comprised of interactive installations that ask participants to consider their relationship to their environment. His hybrid network sculpture has been shown in the San Francisco of Modern Art's renowned exhibition "010101." digital animation "Organum," featured in the AMODA's show, creates a fantastic world of creatures whose has reduced them to their essential organs, and who are propelled by the fundamental forces of nature, biology and society.

Bringing together these two digital artists in a single exhibition creates a viewing environment that compliments and strengthens their individual art work. Both Wilcox and Niemeyer are using the digital process to create fantastic worlds that draw the viewer in. These worlds metaphorically address societal issues and conflicts through a unique visual vocabulary, such as the biological automata of "Organum" and the impossibly large and idealized subjects of "Hamburger Landscape."

In the allegorical world created, viewers consider their relationship to the issues presented in the exhibition, ranging from personal conflict and desire to broader conflicts and the promise of societal progress. These two artists use digital methods to create a visual language commensurate to their discourse on the human condition. This exhibition, as part of AMODA's mission, expands the notion of the communicative power of art produced by digital means.

Text by Hana Hillerova and Joe McElrath

The Austin Museum of Digital Art (AMODA) is a non-profit organization that promotes access to and appreciation of digital art.