Rather than act as a mirror, dutifully recreating or reporting back on the world around us, these artists often act as a portal to an entirely new universe. A universe where the artist has crafted unique entities from scratch through many compressed cycles of evolution. Where fascinating beings and impossible environments blend the foreign and the familiar, giving us a sense that there is life here, but perhaps not life as we’ve known it. This show focuses on the artistic process, highlighting how the proliferation of work afforded by digital tools often leads the artist to spend as much time curating as creating. However, it can be hard for the viewer to gather much context when looking at just one or two works by an artist. So as part of my prompt, I also asked the artists to leverage Edward Tufte’s concept of small multiples, which display a set of images in close proximity together in order to facilitate comparisons across the full group of images at a glance. — Artnome - Jason Bailey

Feral File — Field Guide

In contrast to the other works in the exhibition, “neural swarm” is arranged in less of a gridlike formation and more of a clustering that recalls the display of insects at a natural history museum. It’s only upon close examination and through additional context that we even realize these bee-like insects are of the artist’s own design, and that they don’t in fact exist in the natural world. As Crespo puts it, “These specimens are part of a collection from a particular neural expedition, a swarm of relatives in all their shapes and life-stages.” At first glance, her world appears to be our world. It pulls from colors, patterns, and shapes that are deeply familiar to our conscious and subconscious and plays them back to us in forms that seem fathomable yet fantastic. The end result is a surreal illustration of an imagined lifecycle for a exquisite species that never existed.

neural swarm #33

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