GRAY AREA ARTIST BENEFIT EXHIBITION

Gray Area is proud to present Pieces\Places, an online exhibition of artworks from the Gray Area community. Through explorations of environment and form, these works engage with the zeitgeist to offer a critical examination of our current world, as well as alternative realities for speculation. This special collection is a showcase of the interdisciplinary approach to new media works Gray Area has been cultivating for over a decade.

Artists

AYSE DEMIR

HELEN SHEWOLF TSENG

LILIYA KVATSABAYA

MICHAEL MEISEL

NIKI SELKEN

STEVE PIASECKI

How it works

Pieces\Places is presented online and made available as NFTs on objkt.

The artists are generously donating 80% of sales to benefit Gray Area's creative development programs.

The artworks are available on a first-come, first-serve basis for a set price (no bidding).

Buyers are welcome to pay for artworks in Tezos (XTZ) on Objkt or contact Gray Area at [email protected] to make a sale with fiat currency.

Neglection

LILIYA KVATSABAYA

In her series Neglection, Belarusian artist and graphic designer Liliya Kvatsabaya centers the political protest and unrest in Belarus following fraudulent elections in August 2020. In her work, Lilia portrays the injustices felt by the Belarusian people and mass violence perpetrated by the police. She draws on her own experiences participating in peaceful protests and chains of solidarity in Minsk. The compositing of fragmented objects and imagery from violent arrests of peaceful protestors with her own self-portraits create an intimate perspective of the human rights violations in Belarus.

Liliya is a resident artist in the inaugural cohort of Gray Area's 2021 Art in Protest program in partnership with the Human Rights Foundation.

Spatial Forms

AYSE DEMIR

In her series Spatial Forms, Turkish-born and San Francisco-based multidisciplinary analytics visualization artist Ayse Demir explores and experiments with the formal principles of German expressionism (exaggerated, distorted perspective, contorting form) via digital techniques, producing a clear index to the generation of the form.

Ayse is a member of the Gray Area incubator program and a teacher for the Creative Code Immersive.

particle

HELEN SHEWOLFE TSENG

Helen Shewolfe Tseng is an artist, designer, and witch living and working in an expanding universe. Her art practice centers inquiry, obsession, and non-linear experience, often in conversation with the ancestral, diasporic, ecological, and cosmic.

Helen is a student in the Gray Area Creative Code Immersive.

Creative Resolution

MICHAEL MEISEL

Software engineer and artist Michael Meisel exploits compression artifacting by processing digital photographs at the lowest possible quality, but at a much higher resolution, allowing the JPEG compression algorithm to provide its own artistic interpretations of the original images.

Michael is a teacher for the Gray Area Creative Code Immersive.

Unattainable Landscapes

NIKI SELKEN

Niki Selken's Unattainable Landscapes is a series of dreamscapes created by layering photos of far-off places with impossible weather patterns, waving rainbows, and even shimmering hair. The work was created during confinement the artist experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic as an alternative way to experience the impossible landscapes she could not visit while staying at home.

Niki is the Creative Development Director at Gray Area.

09/09/2020

STEVE PIASECKI

On the 9th of September 2020, San Francisco woke up to a red sky. Immense forest fires were burning all over the Pacific Northwest and turning the skies all tints from smoky ochre to apocalyptic red. Originally built as an immersive audiovisual piece for the Recombinant Media Labs Cinechamber, 09/09/2020 is the product of multimedia artist Steve Piasecki's aim to create not just a record, but a visceral experience of envelopment in a hostile landscape.

Steve is a member of the Gray Area Incubator program.