Art Exhibit: The Digital Landscape

The Digital Landscape

August 26-October 5, 2024

Reception: Monday, September 9, 6-8pm

Free and open to the public

Featuring Mollye Bendell, Ally Christmas, Chris Combs, Billy Friebele, Michelle Lisa Herman, and Kat Navarro

College Park, MD. This fall, the Stamp Gallery is pleased to present The Digital Landscape, a group exhibition of artists using a variety of technological media to both reinterpret and understand the physical environment as well as the ways in which the digital landscape is overlaid with the physical. Through their engagement with media from animation to augmented reality, machine learning, video, and photography the artists expand our sense of time and space through our digital experiences. These artworks examine and interact with the ways in which our digital environments are socially constructed, just as our ideas about borders, identity, and even what constitutes “nature” are products of historically determined systems.

Mollye Bendell is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus in electronic and immersive media. She has developed augmented and virtual reality projects as a resident of Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center and the Tides Institute and Museum of Art. She is also a founding member of media arts collective strikeWare, which creates experiences grounded in our collective history, often using new technologies to emphasize the nowness of that history. Mollye has recently exhibited at the Julio Fine Arts Gallery and CURRENTS New Media Festival. She lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.

Ally Christmas is a visual artist whose work revolves around notions of selfhood, healing rituals, and lived experience. Her hybrid practice involves varied mediums including digital video, constructed imagery, quilting and embroidery, palladium printing, and cyanotype on handwoven fabric. Christmas received her BA in Studio Art from the University of Virginia in 2013, and her MFA in Photo/Video from the University of Georgia in 2018, after which she spent two years teaching video art and photography at Grinnell College as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Video and New Media. Since 2020, she has been teaching lens-based media as the coordinator of the BFA Photo Program at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, WV. She’s exhibited work at a wide variety of venues including bitforms gallery and Soho Photo Gallery in NYC; Millepiani in Rome, Italy; Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, GA; and the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO.

Chris Combs is an artist based in Washington, D.C and Mount Rainier, Maryland whose sculptural artworks both incorporate and question technologies. His show Supercycle (IA&A at Hillyer, 2023) focused on cycles of hype, such as AI and cryptocurrencies. Outsized Effects (Gradient Projects, Thomas, WV, 2023) includes the room-sized Allegheny Data Company, examining data mining through the visual lens of coal mining. Industry Standards (McLean Project for the Arts, 2023) featured 18 works made from reclaimed and surplus industrial components, reflecting on disruptive technologies, surveillance, and environmental destruction. Lossiness (VisArts, 2021) explored the boundaries of human perception. The Algorithm Will See You Now (Transformer, 2022) addressed algorithmic bias and failings of “AI” products. Judging Me Judging You (DCAC, 2018) dealt with surveillance and control, and the 35 machines in Maelstrom (Rhizome DC, 2021) spread rumors about their visitors. Madness Method, a public art collaboration with David Greenfieldboyce, was part of 2021’s Georgetown GLOW. Chris is a three-time recipient of the DC CAH Arts and Humanities Fellowship program and was shortlisted for the 2021 Aesthetica Art Prize. He is a graduate of the Corcoran College of Art + Design and was a photo editor for National Geographic. He joined Otis Street Arts Project in 2021.

Billy Friebele is an interdisciplinary artist working in the Washington, DC region whose work examines the relationship between humans and the environment – especially along the Anacostia River. A current Environmental Justice Artivist Fellow with Social Art & Culture and the Aspen Institute, Billy was also a Hamiltonian Artist fellow and one of the first makers-in-residence at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. Friebele has exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Orlando Museum of Art, the Art Museum of the Americas, the Katzen Center for the Arts, and the Kreeger Museum among other venues nationally and internationally. He earned a BA in Philosophy from St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Billy Friebele is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Loyola University Maryland.

Michelle Lisa Herman is a Washington, DC-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans theoretical and philosophical research, feminist and disability politics, comedy, and conceptualism. Herman has shown internationally in both group and solo exhibitions at locations such as the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain), Cinéma du Foyer Saint-François (Bourges, France), the Corcoran (Washington, DC), The Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC), The Kennedy Center (Washington, DC), Goggleworks (Reading, PA), Hillyer Art Space (Washington, DC), Arlington Art Center (Arlington, VA), Visarts (Rockville, MD), and the Washington Project for the Arts (Washington, DC). Herman’s work has been written about and featured in Hyperallergic, New American Paintings, The Washington Post, NPR, and East City Arts. Herman is an alumna of the Maryland Institute College of Art (MFA, 2020) and the Sparkplug artist collective sponsored by the DC Arts Center.

Kat Navarro is an interdisciplinary artist and animator. Their work combines digital and analog techniques to create vibrant, textural, and fluid animations with narratives that intercross personal history, identity, and a little bit of the fantastical.

This exhibition and related programming is supported in part by the Maryland State Arts Council and The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

ABOUT THE GALLERY

Located on the first floor of the Adele H. Stamp Student Union—Center for Campus Life at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Stamp Gallery is dedicated to exhibiting contemporary art, especially the work of emerging and mid-career artists. The Stamp Gallery supports contemporary art that is challenging, academically engaging, and attuned to broad community and social issues. Through meaningful exhibitions and programming, the Gallery offers outside-of-the-classroom experiential learning opportunities. It functions as a laboratory where emerging artists and curators experiment and work through their ideas. The Gallery’s programming aims to emphasize the importance of process to contemporary artistic practice and to provide a forum for dialogue.

FREE and open to the public.

Gallery hours: Mondays–Thursdays: 10 am – 8 pm, Fridays: 10 am – 5 pm, Saturdays: 11 am – 5 pm, Sundays: Closed. More information: stamp.umd.edu/gallery.