Curated by Ann Haeyoung, Travels through the Unreal brings together four artists creating fantastic virtual landscapes to build alternate spaces unbound by the rules that govern our physical world. Positioning the viewer as a traveler through their surrealist landscapes, the artists invite us see our world anew. Each landscape starts from a familiar reference – an ocean, an amusement park, or a small Texas town – that acts as a starting point for the artists to explore the social, political, and physical confines of our world.

7pm – VR viewing
7:30pm – Video screenings
8pm – Artist panel, moderated by Celine Wong Katzman

MOREHSHIN ALLAHYARI’s 3D Additivist Manifesto explores the politics of 3D printing, a process that makes real our virtual speculations. In her video, they show an ocean of petrochemical waste where bizarre and fantastic objects float by and advertise the possibilities of 3D creation as a subversive tool.
http://morehshin.com/

FRANK WANG’s Rotation Method takes us on a surreal journey of a traveler in a gold plated racing helmet, accompanied by a dog with a phonograph head. The title of the piece is a reference to Soren Kierkegaard’s theory of a mechanism used by aesthetes to avoid boredom, which eventually leads to a state of despair. The character’s likewise make their way on an endless journey of uncertainty, frustration, struggle, and enthusiasm.
https://www.wangyefeng.com/

EVEREST PIPKIN’s Ellinger, TX is a town that generates itself for the duration of the video. Pipkin’s virtual Ellinger is based on a real town of the same name situated at the intersection of two major highways. In creating a virtual town cut off from the network of capital that sustains it in our physical world, Pipkin questions what it means to survive in a place isolated from the systems we have come to rely on.
http://everest-pipkin.com/

In CHEN WANG’s Sin Park, we circle endlessly around a candy colored amusement park populated by abstract forms and creatures that undulate suggestively. Unlike their virtual surroundings, the creatures are in fact real – they are costumed versions of Wang, replicated and spliced into the otherwise fantastic landscape. Wang’s avatar, at once strange and seductive, human and animal, questions traditional notions of gender and sexuality.
https://www.chenwangstudio.com/

CELINE WONG KATZMAN is a Singaporean-American writer, curator, and educator based in New York. Her practice is focused on time-based media, performance, and other forms critically engaged with new technologies. Recent curatorial projects include Five Contortions, Outside the Palace of Heavenly Purity, The Pointer, Make Pictures, Chavez / Hatakeyama / Park / Tamirisa. Katzman is a Teaching Assistant at the School for Poetic Computation where she collaboratively develops and implements the curriculum for a professional development class for artists. She has held research, administrative, and curatorial support roles at institutions such as bitforms gallery, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. Her writing appears in Rhizome, Art in America, SCREEN 介面, and other publications. Katzman holds a BA in Visual Art from Brown University.
http://celinekatzman.com/