Strange Skies
Generative artists are the seers of our technological age — oracles of emergence. They lead us into latent space, the haunted, hidden reality just beyond our sight.
August 7 - August 12
We stand at the threshold, caught in liminal space between two worlds. There is what we know in our mind, and then there's what we know in our bones.
Beyond our perceiving, on the other side of the curtain of the commonplace we feel it: latent spaces, hidden lands, haunted places of the mind's eye. The shadowed reflection of a world we can't yet name.
Welcome to Strange Skies, the second group show from Alba's gallery arm Dawn Contemporary, featuring unnatural landscapes by six code-based generative artists who press through the veil to reveal the hidden shape of the world.
"Nowhere on Earth has these striking colors or textures, yet it's immediately obvious it's a landscape. So where does this place exist?"
Landscapes brim and bloom into an uncanny version of the places we know, from the miniature cities of Mark Ludgate's technocratic fauna and Kira0's suburban strange to Mut's shifting sandscapes, Aleksandra Jovanić's sculptural clouds, Krankarta's undulating hills and monoliths, and Kali's portals into another dimension.
Each artist in Strange Skies tugs on the fabric of the universe so we can see, with them, the lands that lie at the edge of understanding, where we can trace the topography of this unseen world with the finger of our unconscious thoughts. And for a brief moment, we too can draw back the curtain and see past the everyday.
"The central figure acts as a bridge between these two realms — the explicit and the hidden — inviting the viewer to look beyond the obvious and delve into the depths of their own perception and understanding."
Stride by Mut
Enigmatik by Kali
Exceeding all sense, at the limits of our knowing, a rift takes shape. Time cracks open and something beckons from the beyond to a place we've never known. Yet for all its difference, it feels eerily familiar, like déjà vu for an unseen home. We've been led to the ley lines of this charged site and dared to enter.
And it's for this that we turn to artists. Generative artists are the seers of our technological age — oracles of emergence. They lead us into latent space, the haunted, hidden reality just beyond our sight. And as we gaze upon the tangible surreal, for a few seconds, if we're lucky, we might catch a glimpse of the ghost in the machine.
"This piece encapsulates worlds dreamt up by my algorithm that, until rendered in your browser, are hidden from the world."
Billow by Aleksandra Jovanić
Realm by Krankarta
Inspired by everything from vintage illustrations to sci-fi novels, comics, games, and films, these six works, through lines of code, take us into the upside-down: unfathomable spheres at the corner of revelation and apocalypse. And only by staring into the funhouse-mirror version of the world we think we know can we begin to see it more clearly.
"In abstract art we tend to search for hidden images, so I was exploring the borderline, what we see in constructed shapes and what shapes first meant to be clouds can look like or become."
Strange Skies invites us to confront each new apocalypse — each unveiling — with anticipation for what we will find on the other side. It is an uncanny place of possibility, where reality is bent, old truths fray, lost things regained, and true forms revealed.
So, we stand now at the threshold. Won't you step in?
Odyssey I by Mark Ludgate
"A space that is latent is yet to be discovered. There's an adventure there waiting. Unseen worlds…What's hidden is the reality of what things really are."
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