Carla Gannis: To The Max
april 12, 2025 – may 17, 2025
Opening April 12, 2025 // 6-10pm
Ro2 Art is proud to present To the Max, an immersive exhibition by New York-based transmedia artist Carla Gannis. Carla Gannis takes hybridity to the limit in To the Max, an exhibition that revels in the intersections of identity, technology, and storytelling through a bold mix of digital and physical media. Known for her irreverent yet deeply layered approach to art-making, Gannis embraces a maximalist ethos, where AI-generated imagery, LIDAR scans, hand-drawn gestures, and sculptural elements collide in unexpected ways.
To the Max showcases Carla Gannis’ signature fusion of the analog and algorithmic, the personal and the post-human. On view for the first time, her Uncanny Female Objects series debuts alongside explorations in moving image and sculpture. The exhibition also features work from her ongoing wwwunderkammer project, an evolving digital space that interrogates contemporary issues and the ways we navigate them. Gannis’ renowned Garden of Emoji Delights, a bold remix of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, will also be on display. Blurring the boundaries between past and future, her surreal digital figures and reimagined historical iconography create a vibrant space where technology acts as both collaborator and provocateur.
Pushing past the limits of what is real, artificial, or somewhere in between, Gannis turns up the volume on contemporary image-making – bringing us a show that is as thought-provoking as it is visually electric. Opening April 12, 2025, To the Max will be on view through May 17, at Ro2 Art Gallery, 2606 Bataan St., Dallas, TX, with an opening reception from 6 to 10 PM.
About the Artist
Carla Gannis is an American transmedia artist based in New York and a professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Her art is characterized by a commitment to experimentation. Throughout her career, she has worked with an array of mediums and tools, including drawing, painting, video, interactivity, extended reality, and machine learning. Her multilayered narratives explore identity within an atomized and hyperreal 21st-century context – capturing the spirit of our rapidly shifting visual and technological times through blending historical art influences with contemporary digital semiotics and speculative fiction.
Gannis’s work has been exhibited globally in exhibitions, screenings, and internet projects. Her most recent projects include “Networked Nature” at the Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN (2024); “wwwunderkammer” at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC (2023); and “Welcome to the wwwunderkammer” at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (2022). Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Kunstforum, El PaÍs, ARTNews, The LA Times, among others. She is a Year 7 Alum of NEW INC, in the XR: Bodies in Space track, New York, NY.
Show Statement
In “To the Max,” Carla Gannis explores the liminal spaces between digital and physical realms, challenging established narratives through a multidisciplinary approach that defies conventional categorization. From her networked based “wwwunderkammer” project that reimagines the museum space to her “Uncanny Female Objects” that subvert AI-generated feminine ideals, Gannis deliberately slows down the immediacy of digital creation through tactile interventions—incorporating acrylic paint, wig hair, false eyelashes, and inherited costume jewelry that transform algorithmic outputs into intimate physical artifacts. Her sculptures “Love and War” and “Origins of the Universe” further this investigation, manifesting digital drawings and web content into three-dimensional forms that comment on humanity’s cyclical struggles and technological mediation.
Throughout these diverse works, Gannis invites viewers to question the boundaries between virtual and tangible experiences, challenging how we perceive and interact with visual culture in an increasingly digitized world. By finding what she calls “the punctum amongst all the algorithmic studium,” her practice resists the frictionless production of digital imagery while excavating forgotten or excluded histories. Standing at the intersection of technological innovation and traditional art-making, “To the Max” embodies Gannis’s commitment to creating work that is simultaneously disruptive and contemplative—work that hovers in a precarious balance between destruction and redemption, between the “pretty” and the “ugly,” ultimately asking us to relearn how to look at the world we’ve built and the futures we’re creating.
