Sofia Crespo & Anna RidlerSnapshots: Orchids
- Presented by
- Nguyen Wahed
HERE Opening event
Saturday 25th November 2023
4 - 5pm: Jan Robert Leegte with Pita Arreola (Digital Art Curator, V&A)-
5 - 6pm: Haroon Mirza with Kostas Kostas Stasinopoulos (Curator, Serpentine)
6 - 10pm: DJ set by AHMD (Artists Eddie Peake, Prem Sahib and George Henry Longly)
Free & Open to Public
25 - 26 Nov 2023
Address
9 Cork St
London W1S 3LL
In their third collaborative exploration, Snapshots: Orchids, Anna Ridler and Sofia Crespo offer a visual symphony that weaves the analog warmth of Polaroid photography with the cutting-edge contours of digital art. Within this collection of 108 Polaroid printed images, each piece is a whisper of the broader orchestration of orchids, capturing the delicate interplay of light, color, and texture that characterizes these enigmatic blooms.
With their inherent intimacy and immediacy, they encourage a slower, more contemplative engagement from the viewer. The arrangement of these snapshots suggests a natural order, an unspoken coherence that resonates with the organic subject matter. This artwork invites a pause, a moment to absorb fragments of a world that surrounds us but is often overlooked.
Each ‘snapshot’, a word also used within machine learning to signify a captured instance within the training of an AI model, beckons the viewer to consider the fleeting beauty of these flowers against the permanence of their captured image.
Snapshots: Orchids thus emerges as a visual narrative that weaves the temporal with the timeless. The Polaroids act as windows into moments of natural splendor, while the digital aspect hints at the possibilities of art, particularly photography, in a technology-driven future. Through this body of work, the artists provoke a gentle questioning of our interactions with nature—framed not just by physical encounters but increasingly through the lenses and screens that mediate our reality.
This work is presented as part of HERE, an event dedicated to digital art taking place at 9 Cork Street, Frieze Gallery in London. This event represents an extension of Verse's ongoing partnership with galleries and artists who have shown dedication to fostering the growth of digital art within the contemporary art scene.
Sofia Crespo & Anna Ridler
Sofia Crespo is an artist working with a huge interest in biology-inspired technologies. One of her main focuses is the way organic life uses artificial mechanisms to simulate itself and evolve, this implying the idea that technologies are a biased product of the organic life that created them and not a completely separated object.
Crespo looks at the similarities between techniques of AI image...
Nguyen Wahed
Nguyen Wahed is a New York-based gallery with a program that focuses on, but is not limited to, digital and generative art practices. Focusing on contemporary artists (Leander Herzog, Sofia Crespo) who embody the intersection of technology and creativity, it expands onto rediscovering select phenomena in the peripheries of digital art starting from the 1960s (Manfred Mohr) to the first...
