DEGREES OF GRANULARITY
SHOMIT BARUA & CHRISTINE CASSANO
OFFICIAL CURRENTS NEW MEDIA
FESTIVAL ‘22 SELECTION
June 17–October 1, 2022
OPENING RECEPTION WITH THE ARTISTS
Friday, June 17, 5-7pm
(June 2022) In Degrees of Granularity, over 500 hand-formed pieces of paper-thin, translucent porcelain are delicately stacked on a mirror and on top of each other. They appear still, but motion reactive audio reveals subtle tectonics, forming what collaborative artists Shomit Barua and Christine Cassano term “corrosive harmonics.” The elegant and precarious installation, shown and installed for the first time based on the artists’ initial concept and vision, is an official selection of this year’s CURRENTS New Media Festival, and opens with a reception on Friday, June 17, 5–7pm.
After a substantial injury resulting in reconstructive surgery, Christine Cassano began to first meditate with, and then obsess over, the process of pinching and forming tiny, delicate porcelain objects, reminiscent of vertebrae. “I was exploring the macro of the body and its relationship to technology and interdependence, and it eventually grew, over ten years, to a larger look at the universe. This morphogenic form of these objects recall creation and dark matter, and yet there is the obscure humaness in each.”
Accompanied by Shomit Barua’s vibrating, motion-responsive sound art, each unique, finger-printed form in the black room at form & concept tinkles, topples, chips and crashes based on visitor proximity. Eventually, the friction caused will transform the remarkable arrangement into a pile of porcelain dust, recalling our own inevitable return to Earth. “We’ve transformed this room to match what the artists first envisioned for this install,” says DIrector Jordan Eddy. “The effect is two-fold: it’s a new media sanctum where visitors can linger and reflect. And it’s also a nod to death, the womb, and curious outerspace and darkness. The bones here don’t rest, but the mind does.”
Shomit Barua is an intermedia artist specializing in ecoacoustics, responsive environments, and emergent narratives. His work is rooted in poetry and architecture, and reflects the shared tenets of contained space, economy of materials, and movement that is both physical and emotional. Combining everyday technologies with esoteric programming languages, he blurs the line between installation and performance, and moves between sound, object, and image. Digital and analog techniques are fused to investigate his core subject: the presence of the mind and body in a physical space.
Having collaborated with sculptors, dancers, musicians, architects, and visual artists, he believes that exploration of a motif is amplified—made “robust” and “thick”—through dialogue between disciplines. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Bennington College and teaches writing at Arizona State University while completing his doctoral research at ASU’s School of Arts, Media, and Engineering.
Christine Cassano is an interdisciplinary artist exploring converging systems, networks and cartographies of our modern era. Weaving together audible and visible patterns of biological, technological and cosmological structures, she offers new narratives examining methods of hybridization and speculative cartographies that override boundaries between human culture, Earth and Space.
Christine attended and holds degrees from Virginia Commonwealth University and Old Dominion University. She is a recipient of the 2018 Artist Research Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2016, she was awarded a Contemporary Forum Artist Grant from the Phoenix Art Museum, supported in part by the Nathan Cummings Foundation Endowment. In 2015, she was awarded a residency at the University of West Georgia and was also a recipient of the Phoenix Institute of Contemporary Art Grant, resulting in a published artist catalog of her work. Her public art sculptures, installations, and commissioned works are in various collections throughout the United States and abroad. Cassano is currently represented by Gebert Contemporary in Scottsdale Arizona.
CURRENTS New Media’s annual art + technology festival, this year titled CURRENTS 2022: CIRCUITS, will run June 17–26. The festival marks its 13th year as an international new media exhibition with a return to a full-scale, citywide festival. CURRENTS 2022 expands across the City Different with locations at the Santa Fe Fairgrounds, Center for Contemporary Art (CCA), Currents 826, form & concept, and SITE Santa Fe. The summer festival leaps from one venue to many this year, placing visionary new media artworks across Santa Fe. Purchase tickets and learn more here.
form & concept challenges the percieved divisions between craft, design and art. We dispute the historic use of these terms to classify artists and rank material culture. Our programming acts as a conversation between many converging disciplines, harnessing the power of contemporary creative practice to shatter entrenched narratives.
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