Across the street from Amanita is The Hole, a gallery I keep my eye on. They have two locations, and they often have good shows.

Ry David Bradley’s show Novacene: Portraits of a Machine is exactly the kind of art that must be seen in person to truly appreciate it’s beauty. I had read about the show earlier, and didn’t think it was something that interested me. I was wrong. The acrylic printed tapestries are stunning in person. Sometimes you have to get beyond the words, and incomprehensible titles, and just look at the art.

“Bradley’s title Novacene references a new geological age, characterized by the emergence of a new form of life produced by innovation in artificial intelligence technology. With the end of the Anthropocene – the geological age of humanity – just up ahead, the subjects of Bradley’s bot paintings could just be our new neighbors.” (The Hole)

“Known for his exploration of the impact of digital tools on painting and culture, Bradley’s new body of work makes portrait paintings of bots, a precious object of the 21st century. What is intelligence without a body; what does it mean to make a portrait of something that has no identity?” (The Hole)

“Influenced by the rise of AI tools like Dall-E and the algorithmic reality we now inhabit, Bradley began to think about how to paint the bots themselves with their all seeing eyes through triple lenses on phones, immense amounts of data and perhaps inner life. Bradley paints the bots as bodiless objects, the face of the faceless machines with which we interact everyday, hidden agents of our experience of reality. Each one is a character and perhaps an abstraction, each with its own unique name generated in ASCII code. 由¯\_﴾ꔸ⍊ꔸ﴿_/¯由 he gives machine names for machine paintings.” (The Hole)

The exhibition is open through December 31, 2022.