Sunday, December 22, 2019 from 8-10pm

Plexus Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Olive Ouyang. Virtuality of Absence will be featured in Vitrine, an ongoing screening series of moving image artworks.

*Please note the project space is not open during Vitrine screen hours. Projections are viewed from the sidewalk.

Between the ubiquity of digital imaging and the frenzy of building/rebuilding of our cities, we live instant and fragmented existences. Memories – recorded by digital devices, stored in the Cloud, accessed via social media – paradoxically last both forever and moments only. Holograms become the new urban fantasy; we seem to no longer believe in ghosts. Within this context of digital impermanence, Virtuality of Absence meditates on a post-digital narrative where 3D scanning and motion-capture technologies are used to generate immersive virtual landscapes for rituals of mourning and remembrance. The remembered, experienced, and imagined transport us from the corporeal to the virtual, constructing palimpsests that carry a multiplicity of histories. Traces of the past, present, and future become inextricably intertwined, destabilizing any binary opposition between “real” and “unreal.” If we could understand how virtuality produces phantasmatically attainable spaces that transcend Euclidean geometries, can we move beyond the false polarity of the authentic memory vs. technological mediation? Can we recognize and reconcile with the virtuality that deeply penetrates our collective consciousness, and allow it to bear witness to our grief?

Olive Qi Ouyang is a Chinese-born designer, artist and writer. Her work engages the realms of the ephemeral to examine our collective fear of the disappearance of physical spaces, and in parallel – the active architectural production and proliferations of virtual landscapes. Olive received her Master of Architecture with an emphasis in Interior Architecture, and certificate in Historic Preservation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the First Prize Winner of the 2018 Schiff Foundation Fellowship for Critical Architectural Writing.