CHRIS COY

For his second exhibition with Anat Ebgi, Chris Coy will present a body of work called the ‘Transfermaster-C’ series, oil paintings first rendered with the assistance of an Artificial Intelligence program, then hand-painted on linen.

Working in partnership with this transfer program, Coy fed it images of excess and frivolity from the Rococo and Baroque periods. After engorging itself on a ‘decadent diet’ of Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher images, the artist asked the program to map those images of superfluous pleasure onto Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War etchings. The results are troubling. They flatten histories and inherit both sets of imagery—luxury and playfulness as well as violence, rage, and human brutality—forming an aesthetic superposition that in Coy’s words ‘feel as if the soul of the world has been sucked into the vacuum of space.’

On one hand, the paintings vibrate between celebrating artificial intelligence’s gestural, ‘happy accidents,’ not dissimilar to the Dadaist cut-ups; on the other, they serve as a reminder of its catastrophic potential. AI can be used to enhance our perceptions of reality, or distort it beyond recognition. Viewers might consider these works in light of how deep analytics and big data can be used to modify perception and stoke public sentiments to achieve targeted outcomes. Our old paradigms cannot comprehend the potential of these new technologies.

Of the exhibition title, Coy comments, ‘like Richard Attenborough’s character in Jurassic Park, I know there’s something untenable about what I’m doing, but the pace of the vanguard is never one for much caution, especially lately.’ Like his peers of the Post-Internet generation, Coy embraces the unique conditions of present technological advancements, though their impacts may not be fully understood, exploring and championing them as powerful tactics for engaging the world.

Chris Coy (b. 1980, Provo, UT) received his MFA at the Roski School of Visual Arts at USC in 2012. He has previously exhibition work at institutions including the New Museum (New York, NY); Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (Salt Lake City, UT); Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, CA); the Netherlands Media Art Institute (Amsterdam, Netherlands); and the 5^th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art. He has shown work at galleries including Johan Berggren (Malmö, Sweden); Michael Thibault (Los Angeles, CA); Honor Fraser (Los Angeles, CA); Import Projects (Berlin, Germany); and COUNTY (Palm Beach, FL). He is also a former member of the internet art collective Nasty Nets. Coy lives and works between Los Angeles, CA and Las Vegas, NV.