Brian Bartz & Kelley O’Leary: DIAGENESIS @ Telematic Media Arts
“Diagenesis combines the work of two artists, Brian Bartz and Kelley O’Leary, to produce an alien landscape, defamiliarizing the technologies that permeate our world and opening them up to novel consideration beyond their current exploitative ends. The show brings to the fore the physical, psychological, and social-political conditions that unconsciously institute and sustain the illusions of virtual reality, highlighting the extractive principles at work both in the mining of minerals and in the harvesting of attention, and exploring the paradoxically self-defeating – even depressive – effects of our compulsive consumption.
At the center of the gallery is Brian Bartz’s Depressive Hedonia (Refinery), a kinetic sculpture comprised of delicate mechanical parts, flashing lights, and keyboard keys loudly tapping out an automatic, illegible text. The piece was first inspired by a dream, in which the artist encountered a machine that jacked directly into his body, filling him with ecstatic bliss and ultimately leaving him bereft. It speaks to the force-fed gratification of surveillance capitalism, which not only instrumentalizes desire but preempts the very possibility of desiring, by telling you what you want before you’ve even had time to consider the question. It draws a parallel between the unconscious of the dream and the unconscious of the algorithm, questioning the locus of impulse and agency in a digitally mediated world.
Surrounding this sculpture and lining the walls of the gallery is Kelley O’Leary’s TV Rock, an installation comprised of screens, stripped bare of their polarized film and covered by shimmering fragments of ulexite, or TV rock,– a boron ore whose crystal structure carries light from one surface to the other like fiber optic cable. On the screens play video recordings of the American West, featuring data centers and mines where the mineral compounds used to make LCD screens are extracted and refined. But the images can’t be seen on the screens except through the fragments of TV Rock. The piece foregrounds the material conditions of digital culture, right down to its geology. It interrogates the very notion of landscape as always already technological and, therefore, imbued with a culture of dominion and exploitation. It explores the connections between the geological underground of these rocks and the social-political unconscious of this ideology. And it draws parallels between the physical void left in the land by mining and the psychological void engendered by doom scrolling and the other alienating effects of digital culture.
Together these works present an exercise in world-building. The installation, as a whole, evokes a desolate planet in a science fiction fantasy, populated with alien artifacts both ancient and futuristic. Torn free from their instrumental ends, the technologies interrogated in these works are opened to reconsideration in light of this absence and transmuted into objects of aesthetic reflection. The world is turned on its head, revealed in its nihilistic obscenity, but also reconstituted as a place to create and explore, invested with a newfound wonder.”
- Clark Buckner
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Brian Bartz is an interdisciplinary sculptor and educator living and working in Berkeley, CA. He completed an MFA in art practice at UC Berkeley in 2020, and received a BA in fine art from Reed College in 2017. His work has been shown across the United States, including at the Berkeley Art Museum, Well Well Projects, Pallas Gallery, Soldes Gallery, and more. He is currently an adjunct professor in art and design at the University of San Francisco. Through his work, he seeks to defamiliarize our relationship with technology, often by making electronic sculptures with functions that are speculative, useless, poetic, or simply for their own sake. More recently, he has been particularly captivated by the aesthetics of communication technologies such as radio and satellites, and the ways they interact across landscape and place. Some of the research interests which animate his work include depictions of terraforming in science fiction, the present day effects of cold war militarization, and, more recently, the relationship between technology, mysticism, and the cosmos.
Kelley O’Leary is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working across imagemaking, sculpture, video, and installation, she explores the relationships between networked technologies, cosmic matter, and the sacred. Her work is rooted in an inquiry into invisible systems, both technological and natural, that shape meaning making. Her research draws from a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary sources, integrating scientific, speculative, and mythological perspectives with sensory fieldwork and material inquiry. Through these methods, she seeks to better understand human existence within the hypermediated present as a fleeting point in the vast arc of human and geological time. Kelley received her MFA from the University of California, Davis where she was awarded the Mary Lou Osborn Award and the LeShelle and Gary May Purchase Prize. She is co-curator of Living Room Light Exchange, a new media art salon based in the San Francisco Bay Area.