Between 2017-2018, as the Director of Exhibitions & Programming at Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media (formerly Pittsburgh Filmmakers/Center for the Arts), I initiated a program to support the presentation of new work by emerging artists from the region whose practice explored digitally-informed and digitally-mediated artwork and performance. While there was no age restriction, the program was geared towards soon to be, or recent, college graduates to present their first professionally installed solo exhibition in a public gallery setting. Exhibitions were presented in The Melwood Gallery at PCAM, a space dedicated to the presentation of emergent media at the intersection of print, photography, and the moving image.
become camera (2018) is a site-responsive, multi-channel video installation and durational performance by multidisciplinary artist Samir Gangwani. Gangwani’s work explores their experience as a heavily surveilled “brown man with a beard” who is all-too-frequently watched, followed, and profiled as a terrorist. Gangwani debuts a multi-channel video installation that will evolve over the course of their exhibition through performances using strategically-placed security cameras, Snapchat, and live and pre-recorded video. become camera invites the public to participate in these performances as both spectators and participants in an increasingly surveilled digital and physical world. Gangwani will be making physical and virtual appearances in the gallery and throughout the entire building for the duration of the exhibition. become camera is an extended meditation from a series Gangwani began in 2016 titled "Always Watching Part I: A Conversation with the TSA." In addition to exhibiting "My Friends" and "Recording in Progress"—selfies and filmed greetings with surveillance cameras and monitors—the artist will be creating and performing a new durational work, "Staring Contest", that invites the audience to engage in a digital staring contest with the artist that exists both in the gallery and live via the Snapchat app.
About the artist: Originally from North Carolina, Samir Gangwani is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Pittsburgh, PA. Her most recent performances have been presented at the Queens Museum, Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL), Future Tenant, and the Woods Cooperative. Gangwani is an alumni of University of North Carolina School of the Arts School of Music and is currently pursuing a student-defined major at Carnegie Mellon University in Experimental Composition and Performance.
scapes (2017) is an ongoing series of digital images of built-up, broken down, and altered landscapes inspired by artist Amanda Jolley’s personal history with the American landscape. In this body of work, she pulls from her analog (35mm, medium format, large format) and digital photographic archives, combined with her textile and printmaking work, in search of new and compelling connections between physical objects in real space and the photographic images she captures, breaks apart, and reassembles in digital space. Works were exhibited in zine and large-format (3x4 feet). This series of landscapes revolves around the concept of surface: the spatial and conceptual context of the photographic surface, the high and low culture ornamental surface, the process-oriented buildup of layers of print, textile sculpture, and digital image into surface, and the expansive natural surface gone haywire with texture and detail. These works remix fragments of the American landscape-- fields of kudzu, pebbles on the beach, mountains and forests--to create large-scale images that are part photographic collage, part textile surface, and part sculptural assemblage of objects in digital space.
About the Artist: Raised in San Diego, CA, Amanda Jolley is an artist working in photography, printmaking, and soft sculpture based in Pittsburgh, PA. Her most recent work draws from her archive of digital, 35mm, medium format, and large format analog photographs of the landscape, crossing over with her textile sculpture and printmaking work to create digital and physical collages that seek new possibilities in the depiction of the American landscape.
a fairer sex (2018) is a series of digital portraits and video interviews highlighting a diverse array of women and their collective discourse on womanhood, solidarity, and other topics, created by Khadijat Yussuff. Community members feature Ciora Thomas, Anna Labick, Maria Magdalena Duarte, Yuqing Ma, & Tulip Serbin, with music by Clara Kent and video narration by Neashia Johnson. “In today's sociopolitical climate, womanhood is a hotly debated topic. It seems that it's everyone's job to define who qualifies as a woman, what a woman is capable of, or what a woman is allowed to do with her body- except the woman herself. This body of work is an open forum for women of different backgrounds to speak on their experiences and their visions for the future, freely and uninterrupted, through their words and intimate, surreal portraits. Topics include: equity and solidarity within the community of women and proposals for overcoming hurdles facing women or any of their subgroups.”
About the Artist: Khadijat Yussuff is a Nigerian-American, Pittsburgh-based photographer. Hailing from the Bronx, their work is highly influenced by the vibrant colors in every culture they identify with and have encountered along the way. Currently pursuing a degree in biotechnology, they are always in search of a marriage between humanity and the natural world and its processes.