Hollow Point/Strange Laugh
Nancy Baker Cahill
Tuesday, April 17, 7-10 PM
Hollow Point/Strange Laugh is a one-night event at LACE featuring four original Virtual Reality (VR) drawings by Nancy Baker Cahill, a site-specific and interactive Augmented Reality (AR) experience using Baker Cahill’s free app 4th Wall, and her analog works on paper and canvas. Inspired by our current and precarious moment, the Hollow Point drawings in VR, AR, and on paper augment and expand upon Baker Cahill’s abiding obsession: the body as an unknowable abstraction and site of struggle and resistance. Strange Laugh, Baker Cahill’s newest VR drawing, springs directly from a conversation between the artist and Ciara Scanlan, co-curator of Activating Pangea: Acts to Objects, currently on view at LACE, about governmental and cultural policing of women’s bodies.
In the immersive void of VR and the altered reality of AR, Baker Cahill literally puts viewers inside her drawings, and encourages them to walk or teleport through at their own pace, led by their own curiosity. In doing so, she attempts to provoke an empathic response on the part of the viewer—to experience self-reflection as one considers one’s own body and the bodies of others as engaged in an ongoing, unsettled contest— filled with vulnerability, strength, discomfort, and defiance. Viewers have the freedom to activate the AR artworks and create new user-driven content through participation with Baker Cahill’s work.
Inspired to innovate beyond current VR drawing apps and in an effort to integrate her established drawing techniques on paper, Baker Cahill developed her own signature brush strokes to create the works in VR, and by extension, AR. Each VR drawing is animated and two include original sound design. Her 2D works reflect the neuroanatomical influence of her work in VR. In each analog drawing, Baker Cahill suspends shattered forms in isolated moments of frozen velocity. At this event, Baker Cahill will challenge viewers’ understanding of embodied space, blend the most ancient artistic practice with the most futuristic, and underscore her commitment to innovating tools in the inchoate realm of VR and AR fine art. Equally, the artist encourages attendees to participate in reimagining “public art” and harnessing their own creativity by using 4th Wall to engage existing works of art in the gallery, their own bodies and the architecture of LACE itself. Photos and videos created on site with the app will be archived as part of the event and featured on the artist and LACE’s social media platforms afterward.
We encourage attendees to download the free, 4th Wall app in advance of the event. App requires iOS11 and an iPhone 6s or above. Click here to download the app from the iTunes store.
Click the link to see the review at The Art Newspaper: Nancy Baker VR Review
