Sean Morgan and Hiba Ali
| Date | 01.19.18 |
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| Admission | Free |
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| Associated Program | IRL · Welcome to my Homepage |
Sean Morgan
Works on view will include new multimedia sculptures and animations created concurrently with Morgan's stay at the Welcome to my Homepage Digital Artist Residency.
"My studio practice is based in how behavior is manipulated by designed physical and social environments: like how a city can be designed for its residents to be happy, or how a crime boss uses language to maintain power in a criminal hierarchy. I create fictional satires of these environments, attempting to extract specific phenomena or behavior from the people, objects, and things that occupy them.
I start each piece with a drawing or object that is then photographed or scanned to be altered in Photoshop or a 3D modeling program. In my recent work, final products exist through a digital format like a projector, electronic display screen, or digital file. The work that exists in an intangible medium, like a .jpeg, gives it an accessibility beyond what a formal presentation in a gallery could present. The digital file allows for implementation of the art to be equalized and consumable through Instagram, printed in the ads of a free local newspaper, or on a TV. These methods of presenting the environments force them to become a two-dimensional image, making them diagrammatic. When they become a diagram they become something like a manual, allowing me to understand and expand on them."
"I am originally from Dallas, Texas but in 2016 moved to New York City. After having trouble affording sculptures supplies and a studio space I turned to 3D Modeling to make sculptures. Since this time I have fallen in love with the endless inexpensive possibilities of digital mediums."
Hiba Ali
THINKING OUTSIDE THE 'NET: THE BOX THAT COULD TALK
“One day a box came, it fell from the stars and showed us the power of a utopian vision! The box promised global connectivity and cultural exchange through the glutton nature of capital. Regardless of its personality, the box plummeted to stardom. The box lived up to some promises and broke others. Despite the box’s busy schedule, Hiba Ali was able to snag an interview.”
This exhibition feature dual-part installations about Hiba Ali’s arts-based humanities research on “flows,” the capital of technology and commodity culture; featuring a video and an installation. The Welcome to My Homepage residency provides an artist with a one month occupancy of their website where the artist is free to change the webpage(s) accordingly. For Hiba Ali’s December residency, she focused on the dismantling of net neutrality through two reading groups; where particular attention was paid to a communal exchange of information between participants. At MOHA, readings from the reading groups sessions, “Fiber Optics, Gender and Race” and “Surveillance and Agency” are printed to be read by visitors. The reading groups cumulatively address the framing of net neutrality’s dismantling through parsing the (hidden) history of American internet, its infrastructure, policy-making and reverberating sociological affects.
Hiba Ali is a new media artist and writer based in Chicago, Illinois, United States. She holds two undergraduate degrees from the School of the Art Institute Chicago with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film, Video, New Media and Animation and a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Critical Studies. She has worked with diverse populations and community organizing and employs digital technology in ways that empower people. Her sculptural installations focus on the history of objects that are produced from global circuits and their embedded codes, encompassing both the technological and sociological. She is a graduate student at UT Austin pursuing her MFA degree in Transmedia. She has exhibited in Chicago (IL), New York (NY), Istanbul (TR), Detroit (MI), Ann Arbor (MI), Toronto (CA), London (UK) and Dubai (UAE).
