Art Miami Week

Jim Campbell’s custom electronic sculptures and installations have made him a leading figure in the use of computer technology as an art form. Campbell's work is unique in that his media and message are inseparable. He uses technologies developed for information transfer and storage to explore human perception and memory.The artist’s work typically involves pixelated representations created with grids of LEDs, which have such low perceived resolution as to defy comprehension. Exploring the line between representation and abstraction, Campbell plumbs the human ability to interpret the information necessary to create a complete idea. His exploration of the distinction between the analogue world and its digital representation metaphorically parallels the difference between the poetic understanding of knowledge versus the mathematics of data.

_Transition_ displays a low-resolution filtered image of swirls in the Pacific Ocean filmed at a boundary between a shallow and a deep area such that the lighting of the water creates a dynamic dialogue between two colors, turquoise and deep blue. The image is slowed down one hundred times so that the movement within the image is barely perceptible. One has to stand still in front of the work and focus on it to perceive any movement. The image moves so slowly that essentially whenever one looks over at the work they see a different still image.

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Jim Campbell

_Edition 29 (swirl), _2022

Video (color, silent), 768 LEDs, treated Plexiglas

23 x 30 x 2.75 in / 58.4 x 76.2 x 7 cm

Edition of 29, 2 AP

Presented by bitforms gallery

Conceptual artist Sarah Meyohas (b. 1991, New York, NY) considers the production of value, the nature of exchange, and the romantic resonance of the sublime in a practice that seeks to reveal the systems—both innate and manufactured—that govern contemporary society. Pairing a studied consideration of the unrealized potential of various technologies with a deft handling of analog artistic techniques, Meyohas produces work that is as conceptually rich as it is visually arresting.

Investigating the intricacies of a broad range of media, including photography, film, holography, artificial intelligence, and the blockchain, Meyohas unearths potential connections among nature, culture, technology, and humanity. Her vivid imagery makes reference to myriad motifs of art history—from the echoes of classical fascination in the nude female form and the romantic allure of the natural world to the meticulous shapes and colors of geometric abstraction. Subjecting this imagery to various alchemical processes—both analog and digital—Meyohas produces an intelligible visual language that articulates the complex operations that increasingly govern our world: analog technology mimics the digital; rose petals, aggregately identical but individually unique, comprise a dataset for their AI-produced equivalents; Bitchcoin, a cryptocurrency backed by physical artworks, questions the speculative value of currency and the ineffable value of art. Meditative, contemplative, and intimate, Meyohas’s work makes visible the constructs that underlie contemporary society.

Throughout her singular practice, Meyohas acts as artist, inventor, economist, and technologist. Constantly pushing technologies and processes beyond their understood limits to experiment with the yet-unrealized visual and sensory possibilities that lie within, her artistic experiments are often without precedent—the practical applications for the technical processes she tends to work in often only exist within the realms of the scientific or the economic. Meyohas’s work, then, is a perpetual state of returning these processes to nature, of unearthing the inherent connections between the organic and the technological.

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Sarah Meyhoas

Interference #18 , 2023

Holograms, mirrored glass, aluminum

31 1/2 x 169 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches

80 x 429.9 x 3.8 cm

SME.20057

Represented by Marianne Boersky Gallery

Time and its passing are at the heart of Tatsuo Miyajima's multi-layered practice. Numerical displays made of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) form the centerpiece of the artist's sculptural works and installations. Miyajima's development of customized digital LEDs for his artworks in the late 1980s was a major breakthrough at the beginning of his career. These “counter-gadgets” are still central to the artist's work today. The red and green color palette of LEDs was expanded to include blue and later white colors in the mid-1990s as LED technology evolved in Japan and beyond.

Three considerations are central to Tatsuo Miyajima's work: “Keep Changing”, “Connected with everything” and “Continue forever”.

These guiding principles form the basis of Miyajima's art: “One constant is the fact that we are always changing,” says the artist. “In Western thought, permanence refers to a sense of constancy, without change. In Eastern and Buddhist philosophy, change is natural and happens all the time.” He explains the importance of connections (Connected with everything) and adds: “As humans and living beings, we cannot and do not want to exist independently. We are only able to live within relationships in this world.” The third principle “Continue forever” refers to the perpetual cycle of birth, death and regeneration - and refers back to the first two, because “this is the structure of life and truth”.

Miyajima's works thus illustrate the idea of constant movement and change. The LEDs in his works count cyclically from 1 to 9 or 9 to 1, omitting the zero, which for the artist is synonymous with standstill or death.

The artist's use of numbers serves as a metaphor for individual and collective life cycles and reflects his engagement with Eastern thought, particularly Buddhism. Ancient Greek philosophy and pre-Socratics, such as Heraclitus, offer a parallel discourse, with their focus on flow and transition as metaphors for all of life.

Tatsuo Miyajima

Three Hundred Lives

Light Emitting Diode, IC, electric wire, aluminum panel, stainless steel, switching Power Supply. LED type "Time G-FC.AR", 300 pieces, count down

156.8 x 207.6 x 10.0 cm

2022

Represented by SCAI the bathhouse gallery

Shaw’s ongoing photographic series, Towards Universal Pattern Recognition, features archival photographs capturing subjects in altered states of consciousness—spiritual, hedonistic, or technological ecstasy. Encased in custom-cut prismatic lenses, the images undergo magnification and repetition, distorting documentary imagery into a psychedelic display. The bending of light through these frames creates a hallucinatory kaleidoscopic effect, reflecting both the ecstatic psychological states of the photographic subjects and viewers alike. Positioned on the walls of the booth, these works focus our attention on a singular element: the moment of transcendence. They envelop the viewer in an unsettling yet intimate exploration of individual and collective catharsis, ultimately questioning the veracity of documentary imagery as a form of testimony.

Shaw’s practice intricately maps, distorts, animates, and extends records of perceived human transcendence beyond the frame. This presentation for Nova blends the spiritual with the technological, turning acts of faith into communal spectacles that invite viewers to reflect on devotion, ritual, and contemporary human experience.

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Jeremy Shaw

Towards Universal Pattern Recognition

(Supine Pose. SUN-TIMES OCT 6 1970), 2024

Original archive press photograph,

custom-cut prism, chrome

42,5 x 37,7 x 16 cm (16 3/4 x 14 7/8 x 6 1/4 “)

Represented by Bradley Ertaskiran Gallery