Carla Gannis is fascinated by digital semiotics and the situation of identity in the blurring contexts of the physical and virtual. Her work is informed by art history, technology, cinema and speculative fiction, and she produces work using diverse mediums including video projection, digital painting, 3D printing, interactive installation, performance and net art. First and foremost, she is a storyteller, rooted in Southern Gothic and expanded into “Internet Gothic.” Gannis gives viewers a looking glass through which they can glimpse the pop sublime. Humor and absurdity are important elements in her process, and layers of historical reference are embedded in even her most future-focused works.

The process of collage and remix, central to Gannis’s artistic practice, combines and transforms dissimilar imagery from various historical and artistic movements to exist in the present as reflective, parodic and critical.

Portraits in Landscape is a video animation that exemplifies her signature process of remixing historical artworks with contemporary forms of communication, taking smartphone and selfie culture to the extreme. It depicts two separate figures in a twinkling landscape, each immersed in their smart phones and occasionally snapping photos.

The piece is inspired by the sixteenth-century mannerist painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, noted for his proto-surrealist portraits composited from images of animals, vegetables, flowers and books. Rather than static, organic objects, Gannis uses thousands of her own digitally painted emoji to compose her images. The work speaks to the hyper-real condition of inhabiting virtual and physical landscapes simultaneously, and its characters may seem uncannily familiar to viewers in Times Square.

“Portraits in Landscape, a single-channel video from my “After Arcimboldo” series, is a continuation of my focus on combining eccentric art-historical references with visual smartphone language. Through this process I reflect on the constructions and perceptions of identity in contemporary culture. Unlike the subjects of Arcimboldo’s paintings, the portraits in this series are not of aristocrats and wealthy patrons. Instead they began as 3D models, the avatars of our age, that I digitally shaped into selfie poses. I then overlaid the models with hundreds of emoji, similar to Arcimboldo’s process of using everyday objects to sculpt uncanny human likenesses. Bringing the portraits to life in a hyper landscape teeming with “digital nature” expresses my fascination with how virtual and physical embodiments intersect in our networked communication age.”

- Carla Gannis

“Times Square's history and present are saturated with technology and communication. We see it in the spectacular electronic billboards that compose our digital landscape, and in the hands of the millions of people who make it the second-most Instagrammed place in the world. Carla Gannis is an artist who is thinking deeply and playfully about the relationship between our smartphone culture and our nature. Exhibiting this work as a part of Midnight Moment closes the loop between the people on our plazas and our unique environment.”

- Andrew Dinwiddie, Times Square Arts

“Carla's sensational, delicious artwork transforms portraiture and nature by cross-pollinating them with the technologies that are changing the world. What better place to showcase this vision than Midnight Moment at Times Square, the Crossroads of the World!”

- Nina Colosi, Streaming Museum

Portraits in Landscape is presented as part of Streaming Museum’s international programming taking place in 2018-2019 to celebrate its 10th anniversary.

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