The Knoxville Museum of Art debuted its new exhibition, “Electricity for All, which will run until August 17. The title, taken from a TVA slogan in the 1930s teems with surprises. Expecting a retrospective of the advent of electricity to east Tennessee, my pre-conceived notions ended with the realization that there are no historic TVA photographs, and the concept of electricity only provides the spark that propels the artists in many different directions. Curated by KMA Assistant Curator, Kelsie Conley, the exhibition encourages the patron to explore some of the most significant questions of our time.
New technology brings with it aspirational dreams. The Roosevelt New Deal imagined “illuminating lives and futures, providing jobs and opportunity to an area long perceived as languishing in the dark.” And they were right. And wrong. It got complicated. Land taken, dams built, remnants of ancient civilizations lost forever, light came to the valleys of Appalachia, but with a cost.
The artists assembled here explore not only electricity, but the technologies for which it laid the foundation. Some explore its utopian potential, others its dystopian realities. Some use technology as a commentary on itself. The exhibition explores data accumulation, missing data, digital potential, digital markings as art, and much more. I met with curator Kelsie Conley to look at some of the works involved and to gain a sense of the overarching themes and the range of approaches taken by the artists.
Noting the genesis of the idea in developing the show, Kelsie said, at its heart, the exhibition explores, “how information and power and control are all inextricably intertwined . . . There is work in the show that spans a large time frame in terms of thinking about the advent of electricity and new technologies . . . ” The oldest works in the collection date to 1969 and Frederick Hammersley’s computer drawings. Known primarily as a minimalist painter, he became fascinated with the pattern possibilities using a very rudimentary computer. His works show his use of dot matrix and letters to form images.
The exhibition then ranges to include works from the 1980s, with some as recent as the last five years. In reference to pulling the works together, Kelsie noted that about a third of what you’ll see is part of the permanent collection at KMA. “We’re thinking about ways we can use work that is in our permanent collection, while bringing in additional loans to see it in a new light . . . To give it a new context, maybe a new understanding through pairing it with loans from galleries.”
While the goal of the exhibition is not to answer questions, but rather to ask them, Kelsie said there are three different approaches to the question evident as you explore. “There are artists who envision advances in technology as utopia, bringing in new possibilities. There are artists who see it as dystopic, exploring the negatives or the unchecked authority that might come with it. Then there are artists who are simply using advances in technology as a new type of media.
Mimi Ọnụọha’s work caught my eye as we entered. An open file cabinet and another closed file cabinet seemed to be an unlikely work of art. “I think people might look at them and think these are simply filing cabinets . . . but the gesture of this work is subtle and powerful. Each of these cabinets contains information that is missing, has never been recorded, or has been redacted.” The files include such items as “How much data from New Yorkers is shared with outside contractors?” For many of the topics, the artist could not find the information, or it has limited availability. “What we’re looking at with these pieces is an archive of absence or an archive of erasure.”
The exhibition includes a very wide range of mediums for such a small show. “We have painting, collage, found objects, new media works using LEd panels, two videos, sculpture . . . In thinking about the show, I didn’t want everything to just be a screen.”
One LED panel, developed and patented by Daniel Canogar, includes flexible LED tiles. “It’s an undulating form, with references to a human form. We have Apple watches and biometric devices, revealing the cords of how the human body is connected to the digital. It also references grounding ourselves because the information on the screen responds to data sets of earthquakes across the world, taking information from seismographs in real-time, translating it to this image that shows the shifts in the earth. So, it’s revealing the tremors below our feet.”
Two pieces by Jered Sprecher, included a large work, “A Plane is a Pocket in the Corners of My Mind,” which is part of the KMA permanent collection. For a deeper dive into his work, see our profile of Jered’s work earlier this year for his exhibition at the Tri-Star Arts Gallery. “He’s thinking of light filtering through a window screen, light filtering through a digital screen . . . He’s called himself a digital scavenger.” His other work in the exhibition, “Wrethe” features a collage of Audubon Society books. In both, imagery is woven together in a way that reflects the connection between technology and the digital world.
A thirteen-minute film, “Logic Paralyzes the Heart,” by Lynn Hershman Leeson is included, which engages a conversation with technology by having a cyborg in conversation with her corresponding person. The cyborg discusses dystopian potential, including machine learning and AI, and surveillance. The two discuss how they train each other and simultaneously learn from each other. The film dates to 2021, but feels very current with its discussion, among other things, of the environmental impacts of the energy demands by AI.
One of the most fascinating installations, a sculpture by New York City artist Amor Muñoz, features what look like long, black, lumpy windsocks. The interactive exhibit generates different sounds depending on how and where it is touched and the current phase of the programming. “The forms are made from wire and fabric and thread . . . She started by the multi-year project recording water, like rivers, rainfall, lakes and translated that sound into a spectrogram, which is referenced in the forms. She fed the spectrogram into a machine learning program which gives it a “voice,” kind of a speculative tongue, giving voice to water. The artist calls it the ‘occult language of water.'”
Kelsie points out that so much thought goes into water as a resource, water as something needing to be controlled or harnessed or extracted, “but these pieces give water agency, and a voice, maybe a voice that has been unknown to us.” Some of the sounds sounding like water, while others sounded like muffled sounds attempting speech.
Artist Alias Sime contributed his “While Observing . . .” piece to the exhibition, showing the beauty that can be found in technology, while highlighting the waste the ever-shifting technological landscape produces. From across the room, the piece looks like a tapestry, but up close it becomes clear it is made entirely of circuit boards, beautiful, discarded as passe.
You have just under three months to catch the exhibition, which is free and open to the public. A series of related events both at the museum and at Central Cinema are listed here.