This Is Tomorrow: Part II
Zancan, Rapture Captured, 2022
Verse is delighted to welcome you to Part 2 of its online exhibition This Is Tomorrow. Continuing from Part 1, the exhibition brings together a group of leading curators, artists and critics who have each selected a single artwork that has significance to them. The aim of this presentation is to continue to encourage the collaboration between curator and artist, but also inspire the exchange of ideas regarding where art might be heading next.
We have taken inspiration for the exhibition title from the landmark exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, which was curated by the Independent Group, a radical group of artists, writers and critics who met at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. They group gathered regularly to dissolve the line between art and life, which was shaken up by the sudden arrival of new media and technology in a way not dissimilar to that of today.
Curators in 2022’s This Is Tomorrow include David Shrigley, one of Britain’s most celebrated artists, who has selected an iconic work by artist and anarchist Jamie Reid. Reid played a significant role in shaping British punk culture in the ‘70s, designing the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind The Bollocks album cover, among other works of huge cultural significance. 100% of the sale will be donated to The Florrie, a community center in Liverpool, where Reid as he has lived and worked for over 30 years.
Gaika’s work Zenden, selected by The British Art Show Curator Hammad Nasar, is a seminal piece that makes reference to Gaika’s immigrant uncle. The artwork, a slow-moving abstracted portrait, acts as a shrine to him and other immigrants who experienced discrimination and faced difficulties with finding their footing in a new country and culture. Gaika grew up in south London and is of Caribbean heritage. His work is powerful, honest, and comes from a deeply personal space.
Presented by curator and writer Anika Meier, artist Jonathan Chomko fuses Geometric Abstraction with contemporary and digital art. Highly inspired by the paintings of Josef Albers and the installations of James Turrell, Colour Time Marfa is a study in perfecting something seemingly simplistic. Chomko explains the surprising difficulty in perfecting the work’s slow and subtle colour transitions, and notes how the work causes hallucinations, with the human eye often being led to see colours that aren’t really there.
Tyler Hobbs nominates the generative artist Michael Zancan. Zancan’s intricate computer generated drawings display elaborate and ornate natural worlds. Rather than basing his works on any specific real-life place, the artist employs an artist-built algorithm to create detailed compositions that are inspired by the power and ‘resilience of living’ that nature represents. Be sure to read the interview between Tyler, Zancan and Verse’s own Mimi Nguyen.
Jonathan Chomko
Jonathan Chomko (b. 1988, Canada) is an artist working with and against technology. His works examine the seam between physical and digital worlds, exploring how digital forces translate into and act upon the physical world, and how physical phenomena and expression are modulated as they enter the digital.
Chomko’s work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of 21st Century Arts...
Anika Meier
Anika Meier is an author and curator specializing in digital art. She writes a column for the German art magazine Kunstforum titled STATUS UPDATE about the developments around the topic of NFTs in the field of art. Right now, she‘s working on among others a book titled discussing Art NFTs with Micol Ap and Jesse Damiani, exhibitions and art NFT Linz for Francisco Carolinum in Linz, the UNESCO City...
Jamie Reid
British artist Jamie Reid was an iconoclast, anarchist, punk, hippie, shit-stirring rebel and romantic. Infamously connected with the Sex Pistols and the DIY aesthetic of punk. Taking Liberties! features drawings, stickers, posters, banners and publications from Reid's seminal but rarely seen early 1970s Suburban Press period through to 1980s and 1990s campaigns against the Poll Tax, English...
David Shrigley
David Shrigley is one of Britain's most celebrated artists. He was awarded the decoration of Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire or OBE. He was a Turner Prize nominee in 2013, following his major mid-career retrospective ‘Brain Activity' at the Hayward Gallery, London. In September 2016, his monumental sculpture ‘Really Good' was unveiled in Trafalgar Square, London for the...
Zancan
Zancan, generative artist from Bordeaux, France, has been both a painter and a programmer for four decades. By synergizing his former practice as a traditional artist working with oil paint with the computer code medium, he enlightened the graphical possibilities of a « figurative-generative » art genre. His digital artworks and resulting pen-plotter drawings, which rely on technology both to...
Tyler Hobbs
Tyler Hobbs is a visual artist from Austin, Texas. His work focuses on computational aesthetics, how they are shaped by the biases of modern computer hardware and software, and how they relate to and interact with the natural world around us. By taking a generative approach to art making, his work also explores the possibilities of creation at scale and the powers of emergence. Tyler’s most...
GAIKA
A self-described ‘hard-to-place person’, GAIKA is an experimental rapper, producer, writer, visual and performance artist. His debut album, Basic Volume, and his first art installation, SYSTEM, a vast experiential audio-visual sculpture, were launched simultaneously in 2018. Both projects draw directly on his Caribbean heritage. While Basic Volume is an elegy to GAIKA’s late father, a...
Hammad Nasar
Hammad Nasar is a curator, researcher, and strategic advisor. His most recent curated/ co-curated exhibitions include British Art Show 9 (2021-22), Turner Prize (2021) and Rock, Paper, Scissors: Positions in Play – the UAE’s pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017). He is presently Senior Research Fellow, Paul Mellon Centre (London) and Lead Curator, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum (Coventry)...