KT Duffy & Saray Suarez

SEPTEMBER 13 - OCTOBER 25, 2024

And I Can’t Say That I’ll Miss My Human Form
KT Duffy (2017-2018)

Untitled
Saray Suarez 

NEW WORKS BY KT DUFFY
KT Duffy, a new media artist from Chicago’s southwest side and Assistant Professor in Art, Technology, and Culture at the University of Oklahoma, will showcase a provocative and immersive exhibition featuring large-scale sculptures and projection mapping. Duffy's work is created through code-based processes and digital fabrication, exploring the intersections of identity, technology, and societal structures. As a Neurodivergent-NonBinary artist, Duffy breaks the boundaries of binary systems, ones that translate immeasurable connections and examine the system’s impending demise.

The exhibition will also feature soundscapes by Laine Bergeron, co-owner of Opolis in downtown Norman.

In addition to their own creative practices, Duffy is a member of several ongoing collaborative endeavors, such as Langer Over Dickie Projects, CQDELab, and Mx. Studio.

NEW WORKS BY SARAY SUAREZ
Spotlighting the next generation of local talent and vision emerging from our community and the exploration of new media works, this exhibition will also present work from 3rd year Art, Technology, and Culture Major Saray Suarez, a gender-nonconforming Chicanx, and first-generation art student, drawing inspiration from her upbringing by Mexican immigrant parents. With the inevitable tensions arising from differing beliefs, Saray learned how to apply the virtues of humility and intellectual curiosity–creating art at a young age with the help of her dad, and she has continued creating ever since.

The event is free and open to the public. Guests can enjoy light refreshments and snacks while exploring the space and engaging with local artists.

Artist Statement from KT Duffy:

”I conjure entities into existence via technology and collaboration. Regardless of form, my goal is to spawn moments of interaction and genesis within a series of speculative microcosms to propose a future modality where no entity is bound to a singular reality, expression, or substance. The visual elements in my work reference chaos, catastrophe, and creation to produce media that illustrate a dismantling of a presented world and a warping of a new one into existence. This duality and tension in collapse/creation highlight how creativity emerges in, through, and with destruction.

I create video installations and interactive environments where the micro and macro coexist, creating immersive experiences that engage bodies actively adapting to a shifting modality of human experience, which is not the stuff of fiction but one that activates the human animal's inherent fluidity and malleability. 

Inspired by biomimicry, the simulation of natural systems via artificial intelligence, and logic breakdowns between humans & machines, my work is not about what is possible but about making the impossible a reality.

My visualizations often manifest in a peppy version of body horror. Through the intertwining of code snippets, experimental video, 3d forms, and animations, the individual entities of my work evolve and inherit attributes from each other, resulting in carnal and colorful transmedia mashups that protrude outside of easy definition. These protrusions, my hypercolor palette, and lumpy-squiggly forms create a sense of play and experimentation. Further intertwined in this multimedia chaos are the aesthetics of '90s and early '00s music visualizers. As a young person, these hypnotic and generative programs offered me moments of transcendence, which heavily influenced my work's material and spatial evolution. 

In my video sculpture works, I disrupt the boundaries in the devices I collaborate with. Here, I utilize the limitations of automated systems as an opportunity to break out of normative media ratios, leading to cleverly manufactured facets whose material transforms from constraint to bridge. I employ a sly cinema, embedding video modules into organic but undefinable formations. As the video modules slash through the forms, I offer an insight into what is bubbling beneath the surface. In my VR video works, I draw from an expansive and obsessively created library of forms CAD/CAM forms that allow the individual entities in my work to evolve from one another. 

As a Neurodivergent-NonBinary person, the normative modalities of learning and making were not designed for me. I had to glitch and hack through these structures, resulting in visual outputs and curatorial presentations full of possibilities. Ones that examine the impending demise of binary systems.”