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(NEW YORK, NY — December 19, 2024) — Times Square Arts, the largest public platform for contemporary performance and visual arts, is pleased to present their Midnight Moment Winter Season featuring digital works by multidisciplinary artists Laurie Simmons (December), Yoshi Sodeoka (January), and Trenton Doyle Hancock (February).
Midnight Moment is the world’s largest, longest-running digital art exhibition, synchronized on over 92 electronic billboards throughout Times Square nightly from 11:57pm to midnight. The Winter 2024-2025 program showcases video works that employ the latest innovations in motion capture to populate Times Square with surreal, AI-generated vignettes that scrutinize gender roles, collages of the New York skyline through a birds-eye-view, and cartoons from children’s books that form mounds of “discarded humanity.”
FULL SCHEDULE
Laurie Simmons, Autofiction: Moving Pictures, Waiting & Looking Up
December 1-30, 2024 | Nightly 11:57- Midnight
Autofiction: Moving Pictures, Waiting & Looking Up is a journey through AI-generated vignettes—from domestic scenes and indoor pools to city centers and desolate open roads—featuring a shape-shifting cast of women. The animated work is created with the AI platforms DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, which mark a new development in her methodology. Exploring personal memories and scrutinizing gender roles through surreal vignettes, Simmons’ signature style and artistic vision remain intact as her aesthetics are translated into the digital form.
"I was used to collaborating with toymakers, makeup artists, body painters, and Photoshop editors, as well as sourcing images from the Picture Library,” says Simmons. “In July 2022 I started using AI text-to-image models, which I began calling ‘My Collaborators’, as the images we made together fit so seamlessly into the continuum of all my work. I love the way this new work finds a space between painting, photography, drawing and sculpture.”
Autofiction: Moving Pictures, Waiting & Looking Up was produced by Danielle Bartholomew.
Yoshi Sodeoka, Infinite Ascent
In Partnership with Public Works Administration
January 1-31, 2025 | Nightly 11:57- Midnight
Artist Yoshi Sodeoka creates a collage of the city from a birds-eye-view. Infinite Ascent follows the flow of migrating birds across shifting skyscapes and silhouettes of New York City’s architecture. Moving through shifting planes of blue skies, intermittent rainbows and sunset-hued clouds with a perpetual zooming effect, Sodeoka creates a seamless interplay between abstraction and reality while tracking the natural rhythms of our urban landscape.
"Having lived in New York since the '90s, the city’s ever-shifting rhythms—its towering skyscrapers, migrating birds, and pockets of nature—have quietly shaped my vision. Infinite Ascent emerged naturally, a reflection of decades spent watching this urban landscape breathe, evolve, and coexist with the ephemeral beauty of the seasons."
Trenton Doyle Hancock, Color Crop
In partnership with James Cohan
February 1-28, 2025 | Nightly 11:57- Midnight
Over the past two decades, artist Trenton Doyle Hancock has created fantastical worlds that draw from his personal experiences, superheroes, pulp fiction, art history, and myriad pop culture references. Centering around universal narratives of dark and light, Hancock’s paintings, installations, and animations often feature the saga of the Mounds: a group of mythological half-animal, half-plant creatures with interconnecting narratives and physical forms inspired by beehives, Garbage Pail Kids, the Tower of Babel, and even the mashed potato tower from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
In Color Crop, a cartoon avatar of Hancock himself encounters Mound #1, the Legend in a forest-like setting. The furry, clown-like creature emits colorful pigments which Hancock harvests and carries away through a series of playful techniques involving buckets, a fork, drumsticks, and a straw.
Hancock’s Midnight Moment coincides with Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston, an exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York, on view through March 30, 2025.
ABOUT LAURIE SIMMONS
Laurie Simmons is an internationally recognized artist. Since the mid-70s, she has staged scenes for her camera, creating images with intensely psychological subtexts and nonlinear narratives. By the early 1980s, Simmons was at the forefront of a new generation of artists, predominantly women, whose use of photography began a new dialogue in contemporary art. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the Hara Museum in Tokyo; and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam, among others. In 2018–19 her retrospective Big Camera/Little Camera was presented at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 2006 she produced and directed her first film, The Music of Regret, starring Meryl Streep, Adam Guettel and the Alvin Ailey 2 Dancers. The film premiered at the Museum of Modern Art. Her feature film MY ART premiered at the 73rd Venice Film Festival and Tribeca Film festival in 2017. Simmons lives and works in New York and Connecticut.
ABOUT YOSHI SODEOKA
Yoshi Sodeoka, originally from Yokohama, Japan, began his artistic career in New York City over three decades ago, studying at Pratt Institute. Primarily a video artist, he also incorporates printmaking into his practice, guided by his exploration of video art. Influenced by a range of inspirations including nature, mathematics, digital culture, and underground music, Sodeoka's work explores spatial perception and illusion. His creative process involves engaging viewers in immersive experiences by skillfully manipulating perspectives to construct unique spatial interpretations. With a style that transcends boundaries, Sodeoka's contributions have been recognized in publications like The New York Times and Wired Magazine. Collaborating with artists like Metallica and Tame Impala, his influence extends to permanent collections in institutions like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Moving Image. Notably, in 2023, he was commissioned to create a digital mural painting at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, aiming to evoke emotion and inspiration.
ABOUT PUBLIC WORKS ADMINISTRATION
Public Works Administration "PWA" is a digital art project space located in the 50th Street subway in Times Square. We spotlight underground artists who use digital tools to drive culture forward.
ABOUT TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK
Trenton Doyle Hancock was born in 1974 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Raised in Paris, Texas, Hancock earned his BFA from Texas A&M University, Commerce, and his MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia. Hancock was featured in the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennial exhibitions, one of the youngest artists in history to participate in this prestigious survey. His work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; and Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. The recipient of numerous awards, Hancock lives and works in Houston, where he was a 2002 Core Artist in Residence at the Glassell School of Art of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
ABOUT JAMES COHAN
James Cohan is a contemporary art gallery with two locations in New York's Tribeca neighborhood, and a third gallery space on the Lower East Side. Its diverse programming includes solo exhibitions of represented artists and two thematic group exhibitions every year, which often span the three galleries. In the fall of 1999, James Cohan opened on West 57th Street with an exhibition of early work by Gilbert and George. The gallery moved to Chelsea in 2002, where it operated for 17 years before a relocation of its flagship gallery to Tribeca in 2019. In 2021, James Cohan opened a second Tribeca gallery space on the second floor of the historic 52 Walker Street building adjacent to the gallery’s landmarked 48 Walker Street location.
For 25 years, the gallery has been dedicated to championing the work of a global roster of exceptional artists that include Yinka Shonibare CBE, Fred Tomaselli, Teresa Margolles, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Bill Viola, Naudline Pierre, Elias Sime, and Gauri Gill.
ABOUT TIMES SQUARE ARTS
Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, collaborates with contemporary artists and cultural institutions to experiment and engage with one of the world's most iconic urban places. Through the Square's electronic billboards, public plazas, vacant areas and popular venues, and the Alliance's own online landscape, Times Square Arts invites leading contemporary creators, such as Charles Gaines, Joan Jonas, Jeffrey Gibson, Pamela Council, Mel Chin and Kehinde Wiley, to help the public see Times Square in new ways. Times Square has always been a cultural district and place of risk, innovation and creativity, and the arts program ensures these qualities remain central to the district's unique identity.
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