Never before has there been such a robust community and market surrounding digital artists. Web3 has launched a digital art renaissance allowing the accessibility of a wide range of art. The potential for an artist to create and sell their own work online is a game changer. The ability to own work by heavily exhibited traditional artists once unattainable, is now attainable and affordable. This is truly a wild and newfangled time that we are witnessing in the world of art.
The Wild & Newfangled exhibition is a collaboration between objkt.one, the Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art, and fifteen preeminent artists minting work on the Tezos blockchain. The works that are made available in this Wild & Newfangled drop are an extension of both the modern and contemporary art movements. These wild 1/1's are a continuation of the strong history of both physical and digital art, while allowing for a diverse range of new(fangled) gestures to be included.
Digital art is now flowing between the museum space, gallery space, and Web3 on the currents of blockchain. Slowly non-fungible tokens are rolling into galleries and being donated to large institutions such as the Centre Pompidou and LACMA. Exhibitions of digital art by the Whitney Museum and generative art by LACMA are attracting large audiences with work that is both wild and newfangled. With the seas of the art world disrupted by this tsunami wave of Web3 it is time to embrace all that is wild and newfangled within us and around us.
Boundless, without limitation, free, untamable, the rejection of domestication, of restriction, of expectation, of rules, of social mores, of etiquette, and prescribed behavior. To unteach, to undo, to unfurl. Wilding. Something undefinable, just beyond reach. That which is wild. A return - to the wild. To feel the call of the wild: to open oneself to nature, to let go of book knowledge, and dive into the inner knowing of self and source. In the wilds, the lands that are untouched, unspoiled, undeveloped, untamed, and function as they always have in natural ways without any man-made manipulations. The uncarved block.
Eye catching, stimulating, raucous, tawdry, or even threatening to the status quo. A bit offensive, a slur; newfangled. Of the up and coming, of the new generations, the rising of a new tide, the turning point of power, the flip of the old into the new, the questioning, the upside downing of things, the shift we seek from within and feel from without, the change we are all in need of. That which is newfangled, a leap into the unknown, a risk, a reach, an experiment, an innovation, a surprise. To astound, to perform magic, the act of prestidigitation, to create an illusion, something never before seen, something that provokes or perhaps even offends.
We offer you our bounty in the Wild & Newfangled exhibition beginning with Lee Mullican, who won the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959. Mullican's signature linear palette knife technique work is in the permanent collections of the MoMA, SFMOMA, Met, and LACMA, among others. His career spans both the modern and contemporary art movements. In the mid-1980s, Mullican began working with UCLA's Program for Technology in the Arts to explore how his signature painting style might translate to the emerging digital imaging technology of the day. We revere Lee Mullican as a prolific painter and early influencer of the digital arts. Although made 35 years prior, this work only now has found a home within the newfangled crypto art space, where it is able to be natively displayed, collected, and exhibited. Through our ongoing partnership with the Estate we are thrilled to bring a 1/1 Mullican to the Tezos blockchain paired with a physical print for the lucky owner.
In the same way that Lee Mullican explored newfangled art mediums decades before their celebration, so too does Mario Klingemann in the present day. Like Lee, his work has also exhibited in the MoMA and the Met, in addition to the Ars Electronica Festival and the Centre Pompidou Paris. Mario Klingemann is an artist and a skeptic with a wild mind. His preferred tools are neural networks, code, and algorithms often working with artificial intelligence, deep learning, generative and evolutionary art, glitch art, data classification, visualization, and robotic installations. We enjoy his aim to understand, question, and subvert the inner workings of systems of any kind.
At this point, we must address the art world's long history of white male dominance that is slowly starting to unravel. The newfangled Web3 space has an incredible opportunity to undo this pattern of patriarchy through practices of inclusivity, diversity, and parity which are at the heart of this exhibition and all that mowna does. This wild and newfangled drop of artists includes a diverse range of cultures, genders, identities, and locales from around the world that flock and frolic together in harmony.
Connie Bakshi is descended from the ancestral shamans of Taiwan and currently hangs her hat in Los Angeles where she probes post-colonial narratives that emerge on the boundaries between the synthetic and organic, material and immaterial, the human and nonhuman. She has charmed us with her wild re-coding of language, lore, and ritual to invoke the unspoken memories and desires of a collective consciousness.
This movement in blockchain art has drawn new attention to digital art and artists that have gone ignored for too long. Museums, auction houses and galleries are reacting to the Web3 renaissance by curating, exhibiting, buying, and selling incredible works by these wild artists.
"I'm, at times at least, glad my work was ignored for a few... decades. No complacency about having reached some pinnacle that I can't turn away from (due to $$ or ego). The fire to reinvent, rediscover, re-engage whenever I please still burns bright"
a tweet from Carla Gannis who is now experiencing a boom of exhibitions with galleries and museums who are chomping at the bit for her 3D, avatar, hologram, and photogrammetry work. A fellow New Yorker and wild one to watch Gannis was trained as a painter then crossed into 3-D worldmaking and is "winding through the Worldingverse." Her horror vacui approach to her artistic practice has entranced us, as she culls inspiration from networked communication, art and feminist histories, emerging technologies, and speculative fiction.
The blockchain allows discoverability, reach, and sustainability for artists around the world. Augurs, a video artist from Brazil, has brought a new level to glitch art working with nostalgic narrative by using his own touching personal life stories to reveal universal topics. His work, once unknown, is now discoverable worldwide through the platforms that support blockchain based art such as objkt. Augurs, also known as Henrique Cartaxo, uses many layers of technology to create breathtaking imagery. We love how he brings his story and his heart to his art, often working with imagery of his beloved family.
Quilla Nina, a visual artist from Argentina and Peru, creates digital paintings and digitizes her hand paintings of mystical color filled nature scenes, selling them on Tezos to an international clientele. Quilla's use of bright colors and geometric patterns are mixed with symbols, magical lore, animism, astronomy, and nature to create epic scenes that trigger memories, dreams, and evoke mowna's wild spirit.
One of our most wild and newfangled creators, Rodell Warner is a Trinidadian artist working primarily in new media and photography. Recent winner of the Tito prize, Warner is a generous soul, having thrown many hashtag events that support the community on Tezos, and often sends token gifts to his collectors. His work shines, flashes, and sparkles, and we've found Warner's Terrariums to be precious must-have gems.
Web3 is a newfangled space of breakthroughs, blast offs, and rising stars. Before this revolution of digital art, being discovered as an emerging artist working digitally was rare, few and far between. Now with access to Wi-Fi and a laptop, artists are launching their careers through their computers and blockchain platforms.
LUREX creates wild trippy 3D ( ͡◉ ͜ʖ ͡◉) weirdo-glitch and fashion. The Brasilian artist works in cryptoart, 3D animation, datamoshing, and databending to create weirdo glitch people, often with accompanying sound. We love the use of body, motion, play, and music in her work. "GLITCHO & GLITCHEY" still makes us lol and was on an eternal loop helping us through long days and nights of curating for the mowna OUTRAGEOUS! Exhibition.
Nygilia, a New York based artist, is known for her avant-garde approach to otherworldly depictions, inviting viewers to explore the rich and diverse cultures of her stories through the lens of abstraction. We were whisked away by her wild spacious spacey scapes, futuristic characters, and lush color palettes. She is blasting off and we are happy to have our faces burned with her rocket fire.
Ana MarÃa Caballero, a cultivator of prose, pushes boundaries and disrupts traditions by bringing poetry to the blockchain in unique and newfangled ways. She's turned books into sculpture, breathed words to life and continues to shake our cages with her poems. Caballero is a first-generation Colombian-American poet and artist. Her work explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil off romanticized motherhood and questioning notions that package sacrifice as a virtue. She is the recipient of the Beverly International Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, and a Sevens Foundation Grant. Her Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net-nominated work has been widely published and exhibited internationally, recently at Gazelli Art House in London and at L’Avant Galerie Vossen in Paris. We adore her soft warm generous nature and her commitment to the field including co-founding theVERSEverse.
We were drawn to the incredible motion and newfangled otherworldliness of the artwork by beisik, also known as Sasha Belitskaja, an Estonian architectural designer and XR developer whose work centers on novel interactive design models and the interplay of new emergent aesthetics. Her projects focus on utilizing computer graphics and game engine technology to explore new forms of connectivity between audience, architect and community. Her experimental work and proposals have been published internationally. As the co-founder of iheartblob, an extended reality architecture studio she practices her strong belief in collective intelligence.
Best known for his black and white animations that are poignant and reflective, Burka Bayram brings cynicism and irony to our community. We admire any critique of our space or our society, and Burka always brings that with his wildly dark humor. He is a graphic designer and visual artist from Istanbul, Turkey and the creator of Sloth Zine @slothzine. Burka created a mowna logo for our museum during his BurkAI project, in which he acted as an AI image generator by creating illustrations in response to individual's prompts over a 24 hour period.
Huw Messie's work in the realm of experimental digital media and procedural animated embroidered textiles stands alone. On first viewing we swooned and fell hard for Messie's wild and newfangled works. There is a preciseness in Huw's work of rhythm, sound, and stitching that mesmerizes. Messie is based in New York and a recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art with concentrations in human-computer interaction and time-based new media.
Our favorite performance artist and photographer is Violet Bond, who lives in remote Australia. She grew up in the wild places, surrounded by the untamed beauty of Indigenous Land, endlessly in awe of the way First Nations Peoples can walk in to the bush with nothing but themselves and their knowledge and walk out with masterpieces - artworks made of the wild itself that tell the unique story of place and connectedness. Her self portraiture involves photos and videos of her naked body interacting with artifacts, skulls, grasses, and creatures of the outback in performed reverence. She also creates memorials for dead animals and birds with her camera. She makes art for the wild and she speaks to the wild in all of us.
Micah Alhadeff is a digital artist who uses 3D programming and glitch to explore issues surrounding the digital body, ideas of queerness, and the limits of fantasy. He is currently based in New York completing an MFA in the Electronic Integrated Arts program at Alfred University. He creates uncanny fantasy spaces of self discovery littered with nature, fashion, and technicolor screens that one can enter into and get lost within.
The art world has radically shifted over the last three years due to artists, organizations, builders, curators, collectors, and critics gathering together to create new financial and artistic models using blockchain technology. An opportunity now exists that allows artists of various experience levels to be seen, celebrated and compensated for the wild work that they are making. This new way of collecting, and creating art has accelerated important experimentation into newfangled mediums while demanding equity and diversity into who and what is being represented in Web3. The paradigm shift we are witnessing and the art created within it is indeed wild and newfangled. While the opportunity is abundant, care must be taken to make sure the same broken systems are not recreated.
The works from this exhibition are available for auction June 29th in the objkt.one collection here.
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