LILIANA BLOCH GALLERY

Sally Warren:
The Press of My Hands

May 18 – August 3

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 18 // 5-7pm

Liliana Bloch Gallery is proud to present a new exhibition by Sally Warren, entitled The Press of My Hands. The artist focuses her digital printmaking practice on material transformation, using a newly developed inkjet transfer process that employs her hands for mark-making and pressure. Triggered by the denied losses of the COVID-19 period, the work refers to the virtuality and transience of contemporary shared experience.

Warren often appropriates online images as her primary source. For this series, she drew from collected documentary photographs of cities ravaged by war or natural disaster. From the safety of a laptop, these images of distant catastrophes may seem remote and unreal, yet they describe histories that victims must live with. For the news consumer, such distressing events fade quickly into the past, continually replaced by fresh disasters.

Wanting to validate a reality, and perhaps to mourn, the artist turned to these archived records of unfelt losses. Each selected image was considered at length. Its coherence as a news photograph had to be opened up to new interpretations. Looking for a metaphoric bridge between virtual and material, the artist developed a new process to transfer digital images to paper by hand.

The press of her hands, smoothing paper over ink to transfer the image, became a gesture of affirmation. The simple act of materializing what was unfelt provided the bridge the artist had sought. Each finished print became a site of invested meaning and an embodied response to virtual experience.

Sally Warren received her MFA from Meadows School of the Arts in Dallas and her BA from The University of Texas at Austin. She has shown at Liliana Bloch Gallery, The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, the Dallas Contemporary, Brookhaven College, Mountainview College, the Free Museum of Dallas, Tarrant County College, Mercedes Benz Financial Services, SMU Pollock Gallery, and Northwind Gallery in Port Townsend, WA.

Selected works:
Leigh Merrill, Melanie Clemmons and Zak Loyd

May 18 – August 3

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 18 // 5-7pm

Garden of Artificial Sugar is LeighMerrill’s latest body of work, recently shown at The Old Jail Art Center in Albany, Texas last winter.

Garden of Artificial Sugar stems from the artist’s meticulous “photographic” process. Often utilizing thousands of individual photographs, Merrill isolates and then manipulates visual elements of nature before seamlessly stitching or collaging each together to fabricate a unique scene. Playing off the fallacy of truth via photography, Merrill creates her fictional realities that appear as brilliantly colored scenes of (un)natural landscapes. The saturated pigments that now suggest trees, leaves, and other natural elements, appear to sit on the surface of the paper. In some areas the artists manually collage cutout elements onto the surface—further confusing the viewer’s perception of the two-dimensional image, and further pushing the limits of what we qualify as a photograph. With Merrill’s work, what originated as photographs of bucolic flora and funga—void of fauna—have transformed into sugary semblances of reality.

Inspired by the historical penchant for botanical collection and categorization Zak Loyd created a series that introduces the concept of “digital flora”. It contemplates our relationship with natural and virtual aesthetics and scientific methodology, prompting a reevaluation of what constitutes the “real.”

Through a juxtaposition of real and synthesized elements, the series aims to examine technology’s impact on our connection to nature. AI-rendered botanical illustrations highlight the vast potential of artificial intelligence and machine learning, while the retro low-resolution 3D renderings evoke early digital aesthetics. “^plots__/wallpapers serves as a meditation on the convergence of natural and digital realms, exploring boundless possibilities within our evolving technological landscape.

Zak Loyd (he/him) is a media artist and educator interested in the mystical implications of video art histories, machine learning technologies, internet culture, and post-truth politics. His intermodal work includes video, installation, performance, crypto-art, and prose. He has shown at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Rhizome; The Dallas Museum of Art; Remote Control Gallery, Prague; and Mock Jungle; Bologna, among others. He received his MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Art Practices from the University of Colorado. He is a Visual Art Technician and Adjunct Faculty in New Media Art at the University of North Texas.

Melanie Clemmons’ work centers around Net Art (or net.art), which began in the mid-1990s and used the internet as an art medium, as traced through the resource Net Art Anthology. Clemmons reimagines technology as a spiritual conductor poised for healing.

The video Earth is composed of CSS, a language conventionally used to style web pages. In this context, Clemmons repurposes CSS to create a formalist animation representative of one of the four classical elements: earth, air, fire, and water. In many spiritual traditions and video games, invoking the four elements in a ritual space casts a magic circle to amplify energy and protection.

Melanie Clemmons is a new media artist who works in video and installation, net art, digital fabrication, and live visual performances. She critically explores internet culture, speculative futures, and digital ethics.

Clemmons toured with Pussy Riot performing visuals during their first North American tour and collaborated on several music videos. She has collaborated with Zak Loyd since 2009, composing immersive video, laser, and XR installations. Clemmons has exhibited her work at, among others: HeK (House of Electronic Arts), Basel, Switzerland (via Lorna Mills’ Ways of Something); Dieglan Gallery, AkuMills’ Iceland; Scope BLN, Berlin, Germany; the Whitney Museum of American Art, Manhattan (via Lorna Mills’ Ways of Something); Light Year, BrooklynMills’ Park Film Center, Los Angeles; LRLX, San Francisco; Aggregate Space Gallery, Oakland; Denver Digerati’s Supernova, Denver; Women and Their WDigerati’sn; Museum of Human Achievement, Austin; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; and many other DIY spaces and venues. She is an associate professor at SMU in Dallas, TX.

Liliana Bloch Gallery
4741 Memphis Street
Dallas, 75207 TX
214.991.5617

open to the public every
Thursday-Saturday from 12-5pm

lilianablochgallery.com