Carla Gannis

Biography

Carla Gannis is an American transmedia artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She was born in 1970 in Oxford, North Carolina, and holds a BFA in painting from the University of North Carolina Greensboro and an MFA in painting from Boston University. She began adding digital elements to her painting practice in the 1990s and describes part of her work as Internet Gothic, a way of exploring the human condition through online culture. Her best-known project is The Garden of Emoji Delights (2013 to 2014), an emoji-based reworking of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. It is built around three realms, Eden, Hell and Earth, and it comments on consumerism, identity and life on screens. Other projects include Non-Facial Recognition, A Subject Self-Defined, The Selfie Drawings, an augmented reality book project, and WWWUNDERKAMMER, a continuing series that includes The After Arcimboldo. Her recent series include PEEP-O-RAMA and YONDER. Her work has been shown at Pelham Art Center, Laboral Centro de Arte in Gijon, Spain, and the FILE festival in Rio de Janeiro, and she has had around 20 solo exhibitions since 2003. She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts grant in computer arts, the Emerge 7 Fellowship at the Aljira Art Center and a Chashama studio award. She has taught digital art at Pratt Institute, where she was assistant chair of the Department of Digital Arts, and joined New York University in 2019. Transfer Gallery in New York and DAM Gallery in Berlin have represented her. For collectors, she is an early example of a painter who moved into digital, augmented reality and on-chain work.