EXHIBITION + RESIDENCY
JULY 23 – 30, 2023

DANIELLE EZZO & BOBBY DAVIDSON

Future Object

Reception: July 26th from 6–8pm

Future Object is a two-person exhibition of artists Bobby Davidson and Danielle Ezzo and the release of Ezzo’s debut artist book “If Not Here, Then Where?”. Each has a practice that concerns itself with the postdigital and its relationship to technological expression. Together they experiment with the idea of the polysemantic word artifact as both physical and historical as well as digital and speculative. Their respective works are presented in tandem as a dialog circling similar lines of inquiry. 

In Davidson’s "A Noiseless Patient Spider" (2023) he investigates the contrast between pre and post-AI creations and the abundance of digital detritus by repurposing mundane and banal imagery. He uses 3D software to create hyperreal digital fictions which are translated from photoreal renderings wrapping readymade objects. By creating these functional artifacts, he returns these uncanny assemblages back to their origins, while offering a fresh perspective on everyday objects.

In contrast, “If Not Here, Then Where?” (2021-22) Ezzo is concerned with the flow of historical artifacts and how they are sorted, searched, and translated where the form and meaning of objects shifts depending on how they are represented. She builds on and converses with The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s digital archive. Artifacts are then printed and constructed into delicate paper mobiles that are finally rephotographed into new and unlikely forms.

Bobby Davidson’s work has been exhibited with the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, New York, NY; MOMA PS1, New York, NY; The SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Alabama Contemporary Art Center, Mobile, AL; Tsinghua University, Beijing, CHN; The Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, NY; Parsons Design Center, Shanghai, CHN and the Aperture Foundation, New York, NY; his work is part of the permanent collection at the SCAD Museum of Art, Yale University and the New School. Davidson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 

Danielle’s work has been published in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Tate, Lenscratch, and Feature Shoot and exhibited in numerous exhibitions and festivals including the A.C. Institute, The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Far Eastern Museum of Art, and Currents New Media Festival. She’s lectured at conferences, companies, and schools about the future of photography. Bylines include The New Inquiry, Magnum Photos, Art Observed, Right Click Save, Fellowship Trust, and Obscura Journal among others. She is the author of If Not Here, The Where? published by Silent Face Projects.

ARTIST RESIDENCY AWARD

HUANG WEI-HSUAN

Virtual Virtual Award for Extended Reality Artist

Plexus Projects is pleased to award Huang Wei-Hsuan the 2023 Virtual Virtual Award for Extended Reality Artists. This remote residency award supports artists creating extended reality artworks with technologies including but not limited to VR, AR, and XR media. The selected artist receives funding to support their studio practice and research during a one-month remote residency. Virtual Virtual is supported by a grant from the Unnamed Fund.

Huang Wei-Hsuan (Taipei, Taiwan) creates works that provoke conversation between audiovisual and projection, aiming to trigger the imagination of audiences. During his remote residency he will develop Shifting Borders, an interactive two-person virtual reality experience. This project focuses on the creation of a digital twin for the spatial perception with individuals respectively sensing with HMDs. Participants are both audience and performance. They observe a virtual world in different corners and encounter physically together in a parallel universe. The question of “Where do I exist?” is blurred by the technology of a “digital twin” that exists in the cloud. Shifting Borders explores the dialogue between sensing and being sensed.

Artists-in-Residence
December 2022

Mark Ramos is a Brooklyn-based new media artist. Mark makes fragile post-colonial technology using web/software programming, physical computing (using computers to sense and react to the physical world), and digital sculpture/fabrication to create interactive work that facilitate encounters with our own uncertain digital futures. Mark is deeply committed to the ethos of open source: the free sharing of information and data + creative uses of technology. Mark has exhibited his work and lectured widely both online and AFK including as part of Rhizome's First Look: New Art Online with the New Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Times Museum in Beijing, the Sichuan Biennial, Arebyte Gallery in London, and at the Peter Weibel Institute for Digital Culture in Vienna. He teaches Art after the Internet in the MFA Fine Arts Department at the School of Visual Arts, Form and Code at Pratt Institute, as well as Web Programming and Computer Principles in the Computer Science Department at NYU. You can also find him playing drums for various bands in Brooklyn.

Ziyang Wu is an artist based in New York and Hangzhou, currently teaching at School of Visual Arts and the School of Design and Innovation at China Academy of Art, and is a current member of New Museum’s art and technology incubator NEW INC. With an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a BFA from the Florence Academy of Fine Arts, his works have exhibited internationally, including Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia, Rhizome at the New Museum in New York, Walker Art Center and Rochester Art Center in Minnesota, Academy Art Museum in Maryland, Today Art Museum, Times Art Museum and Song Art Museum in Beijing, Ming Contemporary Art Museum and Powerlong Museum in Shanghai, Medici Palace in Florence and Milan Design Week. Recent awards and residencies include “Kai Wu” Interdisciplinary Studio Residency at Media Art Lab at Times Museum, Residency Unlimited (RU) , MacDowell Fellowship, Institute for Electronic Arts (IEA) at Alfred University, Art(ists) on the Verge Fellowship by Northern Lights.mn and Jerome Foundation, AACYF Top 30 under 30 (Class of 2021), the AICAD Teaching Fellowship by Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design.

Residency Project

We will be finalizing production on a new generative artwork called #dump. #dump is a landfill of AI-generated objects made with text scraped from social media platforms. We’re using Unreal Engine 5 with and a custom Twitter bot (we’re calling dump-bot) and UE5 C++ Blueprints to generate the simulation. "dump-bot" lives on a hidden server at nyu computer science and monitors Twitter in real-time for the latest tweets and dumps them into our unreal landfill simulation. Certain hashtags trigger different AI object dumps related to the text content used to generate them. We used dreamfields3D GAN to generate the objects.

ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
NOVEMBER 2019

Plexus Projects is pleased to welcome back Mark Ramos as an Artist-in-Residence to create new work for the upcoming Satellite Art Show. Ramos’s virtual_topographies was included in the Future Artifact group exhibition at Plexus Projects in 2018 during Creative Tech Week.

Mark Ramos is a Brooklyn-based new media artist. Mark is deeply committed to the ethos of open source: the free sharing of information and data + creative uses of technology. His work is engaged with democratizing the worlds of art and technology through community and individual empowerment via the means of technological production. Mark works with the mediums of physical computing (using computers to sense and react to the physical world), software programming and digital sculpture to create interactive, installation work that facilitate encounters with our own uncertain digital futures.

Mark has exhibited his work locally both in New York City and San Francisco, including the inaugural exhibition of Arsenal Gallery in Brooklyn and as part of multiple exhibitions at Artist Television Access and internationally in Europe and Asia. He is an adjunct faculty member at the School of Visual Arts and Hunter College.

December 2018
Artists in Residence
Laimah Osman & Candace Williams

Plexus Projects is pleased to welcome Laimah Osman and Candace Williams as Fall 2018 artists in residence. Osman will be using the project space to document recent works on paper. Williams will be documenting her recent chapbook, Spells for Black Wizards (The Atlas Review).

Laimah Osman is a Brooklyn-based artist and educator whose artistic production takes the form of prints, drawings, and artists’ books. Her work has been displayed in numerous exhibitions and is archived in various libraries. She has been awarded residencies at The Lower East Side Printshop, Kala Art Institute, and Women’s Studio Workshop, as well as grants from Brooklyn Arts Council and Jerome Foundation. Currently, she is teaching at Parsons School of Design and making prints with local poets. She earned a BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University (1998) and an MFA from Pratt Institute (2010).