Multimedia artist Christiane Peschek constructs her environments as places of potential relations between organic and technological, human and artificial intelligence. From sound to smell, from object to image, her work plunges the public into a sensory confusion, starting with the visual confusion created by many of her digital images.
In his latest exhibition, “Liminal Ghost”, presented by Sanatorium at Diana Gallery in New York, the retouched images float in a space gridded with cross-stitches on a gray background. “Bodily evocations” – portraits, hands, teeth, jewellery – are detached from their material part. The series is inspired by the digital and identity fatigue of a world overstimulated by images and networks, where the difference between reality and virtuality becomes blurred. In these images, bodies fade into indistinction, reminiscent of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century spiritualist photographs, while the background grid captures them like the matrix of a computer program, affirming their materiality as accumulated pixels.
Post-Binary Environments
Peschek works with digital images in the same way as she sculpts wax for its organic evocations. In her installations, she questions the fluid form of our identities, and the possibility of an organic, post-binary construction of identity. The spaces she proposes often echo a certain pan-cultural rituality: here spectres, there, a spa or public baths, spaces of care often referred to by the artist as retreats. Her “Oasis” installation offers a potential sanctuary for non-binary corporalities, where water is a central element, traversing forms between sound sculptures and viscous images. With Eden, the smartphone creates a new concept of spiritual retreat.
Composing visual and material elements, physical and virtual immersion, corporeality and technological interface, the artist invites us to embrace those queer connections that technology intuitively enables.
instagram.com/christiane_peschek
États-Unis – New York