Lauren Krasnoff’s “500 Club Crowd” is part of the “Art (Official) Intelligence” exhibition at Gallery 14C in Jersey City.
Is there anything interesting to say about artificial intelligence? Or are we forever doomed to toggle between dull, near-religious pronouncements about its coming transformative power and condemnations of its bottomless appetite for electricity? Artists and storytellers are drawn to comment on it, but they haven’t yet added much to the man-vs.-the-machine musings made by Rod Serling several paradigm shifts ago. We can all agree that it would be bad to outsource human creativity to a mainframe somewhere. Whether artists have anything to gain from engagement with the latest automation technology is a matter of debate — but maybe it’s not the most interesting debate in the debate club.
So far, the results of our AI experiments haven’t been too hot. Automatic art made through aggregation exists, yes, but nearly all of it has been aesthetically worthless. In healthy scenes like the one in Jersey City, artists barely touch the stuff. At Project 14C, a bustling residency in the Powerhouse Arts District, the prevailing methods of meaning-making are as organic as they would have been a half-century ago. The “Art (Official) Intelligence” show at the dedicated Gallery 14C is fun, grotesque, varied, defiantly personal, and more concerned about what technology cannot reach than what it can.
Even the title of the exhibition is old school. Hip-hop fans will remember Art Official Intelligence as the cheeky handle De La Soul gave to a series of idiosyncratic (but very smart) recordings made over a quarter of a century ago. Even then, artists were anxious to show that human beings could easily outpace and out-weird whatever computers might output. In “Art (Official) Intelligence” at Project 14C, curators and contributors Alexis Caruso and Velawsmo are up to something similar. They have asked 21 fellow artists-in-residence to expose their messy, irreducible selves in a group exhibition that includes painting, video, textiles, sculpture, strange objects, and pieces that defy algorithmic classification.
Velawsmo’s “The Interstice.”
They do not have to travel far. Many have concluded that our unruly bodies are our most obvious mark of separation from our would-be machine overlords. Computers have well organized and neatly classified innards; we don’t. Our wheels are not so easily greased, our circuits not so easily broken, and our appetites not so easily controlled. In “Smaller,” a tapestry in hot pink and coal black, Caruso weaves squiggles in the shape of intestines, serpentine, hissing with demands. Velawsmo’s canvas “The Interstice” is crammed corner to corner with red, fleshy folds. Atop the mass of sinew, the artist has superimposed two white circles. They feel unnatural and unwelcome. They’re bits of icy negative space delivered with the clinical quality of a machine printout.
Velawsmo’s circles are hard pills to swallow. An antidote hangs on an adjoining wall. Valeriya Fadeyeva “Touch,” a tufted rug, soft as a pet’s bassinet, reaches its fibrous fronds toward the viewer. Everything about the work is gentle: the lavender curves sewn into the tapestry, the plush shag, the baby-aspirin shade of Fadeyeva’s fiber. This is art designed to make you think about its maker, spool of yarn in hand, affixing a strand to a needle, doubling it over and tying it tight, eyes watching, fingers moving, arms tugging, hands cutting, brain fully engaged.
Comforting as “Touch” is, it hints at peril. It could not have been made without the use of something sharp. A computer risks nothing when fabricating a piece; a person always puts her fingertips on the line. Evidence of the blade is frighteningly present in the work of Michele Bonds, who affixes sheet after sheet of colored paper to her panels and then turns the razor on them. “The Irreversible Intimacy of Two Collapsing Bodies” is a system of canyons tipped vertically, full of curved slashes with exposed strata in bright shades. Bonds’ arcs jump the gutter between the piece’s two panels as if it isn’t there. Her work feels topographical, near-geological, carved through sweat and effort, busy with crags and pleasantly uneven bits that could only have come from a human hand bearing a dangerous object.
Gorges, after all, are cut into the prairie by God himself. Their roughness is part of his brawny signature. Bonds, like many of the participants in “Art (Official) Intelligence,” sees the machine’s precision as a sign of its distance from the heavenly ideal. The physical gestures of the creator are visible in William Masters’ energetic collisions of acrylic, wood, rope, canvas, cardboard, and other materials that possess visible heft. One of his pieces is dominated by what appears to be a single broad, sweeping stroke in black and plum. Unsurprisingly, he calls it “Integrity.”
A detail from Anna Collevecchio and Matthew Yacavone’s “Respira Luminari.”
Pieces so muscular have the effect of drawing attention to our own bodies. They remind us that we’ve got hands, and that those hands can accomplish things in the physical world. “Respira Luminari,” an interactive sculpture created by the artist and mystic Anna Collevecchio alongside the software engineer and computer scientist Matthew Yacavone, pushes even deeper. Collevecchio and Yacavone encourage viewers to slip curious fingers into the groove of a sensor at a control station. Doing so wakes the crimson glow in a great, velvety oval pillow suspended on the wall and radiating inner light. It throbs and pulses to the rhythms of the observer’s heartbeat.
This feels a little like visiting a fortune teller, a little like “Star Trek,” and more than a bit like getting hooked up to a monitor at an aesthetically sensitive cardiologist’s office. The sculpture seems to be speaking directly to your body but, really, it’s an indication that your body is constantly speaking to itself.
That’s a metaphor for artificial intelligence and the LLM experience. No matter how intelligent the machine seems to be or how quick a processor it is, it is only as smart as what we ordinary humans put into it. The machine is not a foe. It is something scarier: It’s our mirror.
TRIS McCALL
A detail from George Goodridge’s installation at Gallery 14C in Jersey City.
Thus, an embrace of technology is not necessarily a repudiation of our humanity. George Goodridge, for instance, is unabashed in his enthusiasm for electricity and what it can do. He splashes colored light all over glowing three-dimensional canvases that he has stretched and shaped like clouds. Caruso and Velawsmo have gifted Goodridge an entire corner of Gallery 14C to fill with his cumulus creations, and he has made the whole thing as weightless as a moonbeam.
Luiza Gottschalk answers in the center of the gallery with a cascade of thin textile sheets, densely packed as the curtain at the end of a car wash, each one exuberantly illustrated, each a little billow of color. In the middle of this textile thicket, a song pours forth from a small speaker. The heart at the center of the maze turns out to be a little machine.
Gel lights and portable audio decks are, by 2026 standards, humble devices. Compared to databases and algorithms, they seem like old friends: carriers of crucial information and specific heat from the people who have touched them. On the floor next to Gottschalk’s highly vertical installation, Benjamin Lee Sperry goes horizontal with an autobiography told in objects. In the emotional “Red, Green, Neutral (I, Me, My),” Sperry jigsaws together scores of snapshots, unsent envelopes, milk crates, half-used art supplies, and boxes open and yawning. Traces of handwriting and random jottings score sheets of paper torn out of notebooks, and paintings and drawings in various states of completion chronicle a creative life in progress. The hungry Sperry includes empty yogurt cups (ideal for mixing paint), lollipops, beer and soda bottles. Our brains may be running the show, but our mouths and bellies remind us that we’re alive.
TRIS McCALL
A detail from Benjamin Lee Sperry’s “Red, Green, Neutral (I, Me, My).”
Sperry’s floor array feels fiercely analog, composed of ordinary materials like paper, cheap plastic, wire, ribbon and frayed Post-it notes. Every one of the thousands of pieces in this suburban bedroom mosaic has been strategically placed in dialogue with the objects in its vicinity. What emerges is a composite image of an individual, and a strange and effective profile that required no electricity to create. Yet the funny thing about “Red, Green, Neutral” is that the logic that underpins the piece isn’t altogether different from the one that powers artificial intelligence. Computers also assemble pictures of us from the purchases we make, the images we post, and the products we consume. The inelegant term “data scraping” is a common modern practice, and it is one of the things about AI that people have come to hate. Even if no human is looking, the automated profiling makes us feel like we’re being watched.
Perhaps we are safest in the anonymity of a crowd. The oil paintings of Lauren Krasnoff look like busy, colorful, energetic abstractions at first glance, but they soon cohere into cropped images of rows of spectators at major sporting events. The artist stacks body atop body, making each limb as sinuous as a streamer in the wind — their little fists clenched, and arms up over their heads and waving in an expression of berserk, form-contorting enthusiasm. You’ve been to a big game; you know she isn’t exaggerating.
“500 Club Crowd” (see at top), a demonstration of the vision that has made Krasnoff one of the most interesting artists to emerge in Hudson County in recent memory, stuffs scores of faceless human figures onto a modest-sized rectangular panel. Every individual is different and discrete, but they are unified by a common excitement.
Sherly Fan’s “Ophelia.”
What is missing from “Art (Official) Intelligence” are the expressions of extreme paranoia that usually accompany examinations of the technosphere. Nothing is coming unstitched. Ego boundaries aren’t blurring. There are no cyborgs in this show, and not many compromises, either. Krasnoff’s people are willowy and bendable, but they are still flesh and blood, and flesh and blood, as this show repeatedly argues, are inviolable. The visual prankster Sherly Fan presents the anxious “Ophelia,” a hot pink bunny in oil and acrylic on canvas, soft and malleable, but very much intact and with clear bodily boundaries. The animal floats on its back on a blue river, and may well be approaching the rapids, but if it goes over, it will retain its cohesion as it does.
The painter Flying Knight goes directly after the surveillance state in a painting of five eyes, each staring outward through knotholes in a purple wallpaper pattern that resembles a motherboard. Yet the painter’s hero is the black cat who steps lightly through the scene. That animal looks quick, tough to pin down, and even harder to catch. “The Great Escape” is still possible for us if we can maintain our balance and our sense of ourselves — and keep moving.
Gallery 14C at Project 14C in Jersey City will present “Art (Official) Intelligence” through April 2. Visit arts14c.org/gallery-14c.
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