This exhibition was originally showcased at the University of Guanjuato in Mexico in August of 2006.

Curator's statement:

The first impression given by the exhibition Inter-play is that of a shifting kaleidoscope of ideas, methods, and techniques by a varied group of young artists. With further visual contemplation, one finds fluid connections moving through many of the paintings, photographs, and videos via interplay of media technology. The University of Texas at Dallas, with its dual program of Arts and Humanities and Art and Technology, is fostering a new critical mass of creativity. The interaction of critical and creative thinking with visual image making has produced a rich and talented group of young emerging talent. A small sampling is seen here.

Today's young artists have grown up under the influence of computers, the Internet, and music videos. These new media have reshaped the world and provided new creative possibilities. While not all of the artists use the computer directly, they have all come to terms with it in various ways as it changes the world in which we live. It's a time where so much of the information encountered every day is being digitally mediated—a phenomenon that has forced these artists to deal with critical and conceptual issues of picture making with results often blurring the lines in a collision with visual culture. They fluidly move between various forms of cultural production, utilizing forms of advertising, graphic design, photography, and videos in their studio practice, creating interplay of visual experiences. These artists are actively engaged in this world of electronic experiences, framing their perceptions aesthetically in new visual experiences.

– John Pomara

Artists Statements

I use video as a tool to push the boundaries of technology to create art. I portray reality as an abstraction in motion; duplicating, utilizing grids and manipulating through the process. In the completion, I am extending the eyes of the viewer to see the invisible and to see the possibilities in reality, if only to take a closer look. — Elizabeth Alavi

I merge organic style imagery with a process that is inherently inorganic (the use of the computer). The results are images in constant flux based on the pattern, the amphibious and the microcosm. The work contains tangible elements within the movement and morphing layers that contain the repetitious shape of cells and pattern. Stretched pixels move across the screen denoting a digital speedy movement. The moving patterns, manipulated digitally, create a moving painting where color and forms collide to create an enveloping environment. — Mary Benedicto

I use the handwritten signature of the subject (repeated and placed into patterns) and an audio recording of the subject saying his/her name, edited on the computer and printed on Dibond. The signature and the voice are like fingerprints. A portrait is a work of art that portrays an individual uniqueness. These works are portraits and thus they are named after the subject. — Todd Camplin

I was inspired by the phenomenon of photo diaries and self-portraits to document my own life by photographing toys and objects that I own. I collect and surround myself with these little toys and trinkets that have come from various places, times and people throughout my life. People collect what they love, and therefore the collections become portraits of that person as well as a timeline of their life.
— Shelby Cunningham

GridCode is a visually and acoustically repetitious experience. Mechanized and electrified rhythms slide across the screen with the precise punctuality of an atomic clock. Optimum optical and aural efficiency reduce screen time to the maximum logical durational requirements. Looped brain input created by GridCode ensures an impending synaptic storm. — Robert Flowers

The encroachment of urbanization causes a lack of virtual organic space. The video installation Meditation breaks boundaries of livable space and temporality of time. It reflects the curves of nature reinforced with the steel cage of contemporary living. The virtual steel beams tear apart into flat lines exposing their inner structures. The form flows outward into infinitesimal space and the viewers are left to reclaim the empty space for themselves. — Tuan Ho

Since the day I immigrated to America, I have been struggling with the concept of total Western assimilation. In my work, seeking memories of my childhood in Asia has become a major theme. Anime, comic books, neon lights, bus rides, skyscrapers, and smog are just a few iconic images I faintly remember from Taipei, Taiwan, that make up my visual vocabulary. The idea of capturing these moments in time means I've retained some ethnic resilience despite my circumstances. In my newest body of work, I am attempting to portray the dichotomy of the issues on interracial relations, family culmination, stereotypes and self-image, passage of tradition, and technological dualism. I have chosen to express my ideas with abstract photography, deliberately using various camera techniques to produce non-representational images. I feel this method best conveys my conflicted emotions of how my minority background intersects with the majority thinking. After all, I still feel I do not fit perfectly with either Asian or American values. — Jin-Ya Huang

My work visually interprets the interdependencies between painting, fashion and technology. Using the tools of photography, I capture the union of clothing and the figure, and through the computer, I manipulate, recontextualize and alter these images. As a result, the paintings take on the stylistic devices of color and texture and push the boundaries of the digital image. My video is an exploration into the melding of traditional media and technology. By capturing the sparkle of glitter and manipulating the digital image, I seek to create a new visual dialogue and experience through color and motion.
— Sara Ishii

Living in today's digital age and the visual experience that it translates into is a cultural attack on even the simplest image. The tension created in contemporary art between the artist's hand verses the machine has altered the inexorable deluge of image and subject matter. The hierarchy of visual images fluctuates between the strike of the painter's brush and the punch of the artist's keyboard. Pictures that look like paintings and paintings that look like computer printouts are the nature of artistic depiction in the current milieu. As an artist, I work in the fundamental element of collage and color theory. Images that refer to another stage of reality while remaining set in a conventional structure. Pixel forms and architectural references with pop overtones operate as components of a digital still life. I take hand made objects (paper collage) and exercise the collages through various machines (computers, scanners, copiers) to create the elements of the final image. The works are completed in a wide landscape of media, which include oil enamel, acrylic, latex on inkjet print and video. — Kirsten Macy

The imagery in this work is lifted from photographs of NASA space flights, particularly the last missions of the Challenger, Columbia and Discovery. Using sources ranging from science fiction and the antiquated technology of current space flight, the work takes the mechanical aspect of the subject matter and flattens it into color planes influenced by graphic and fashion design, early video games, and the future aesthetic of the 1980’s. Creating a minimal color relationship further energizes the juxtaposition of the tragic subjects and the clean unemotional surface. To supplement the spatial interactions within the space, satellite pieces are connected with lines that mimic science fiction movies from the late seventies and eighties and video games in their most primitive stages. Through flattening and engaging the space around the installation, the paintings reflect on the aging technology of now and the experience of growing up with the current future that the technological knowledge of yesterday provides. — John Ryan Moore

Opaque and transparent, cake and candy, whitewash is never white. Time adds layers and erodes layers at the same frequency but with different elements. Children are pillars of a landscape of butterflies and rainbows, while the houses are on fire. The significance of a house changes when it burns as to when it is stable. Stability creates complacency while fire creates change. The idea that layers of paint can hold images within them is capturing the process of time. This work is about time and the appearance of cleanness and simplicity. More to be seen in closeness than distance, there is a psychological effect of contentment and dismay in the process. — Polly Perez

I remember in my childhood taking instructions and cutting a silhouette of a figure in a tightly folded bundle of paper. Aptly unfolding each crease, I unveiled to myself a queue of little paper bodies attached hand-to-hand and foot-to-foot. My eye, fascinated with the efficient and miraculous replication, soon observed each body did not copy exactly. Slight differences appeared due to the individual paper sheets slipping out of registration between my little fingers while the slicing scissors determined the genetic qualities my people would embody. — Bill Schroeder

I ripped the DVD of 16 Candles to my laptop and reduced the school dance scene to only 16 lines of vertical resolution (leaving the horizontal resolution unchanged) and then replaced the sound with a loop I composed on a really old computer. — Paul Slocum

I am interested in the medium of paint as paint-- in its literal attributes (paint as an object)--as well as what I can do with it in a more traditional sense to create imagery and tell a story. I like to use both schools in my work. This sets up a pendulum where various methods fight for importance, but instead create a very tense, awkward and fragile balance. I want this tension to be contained like a shaken up bottle of coke …so much so that is almost makes the work vibrate. Specifically, this tension occurs when clean color is played against an emphatic black line; that happens when one or two of these stylistic devices are joined with a delicate or sharp realism and when an active, expressive hand is used in the rendering of a character, place or thing. I want this balance of tension to be multilayered in my work.
— Raychael Stine

My work deals with hybrid forms of visual art encompassing painting, sculpture, light and video. I like working with ready-made industrial products that reflect minimalist concerns with a twisted dystrophic vision. It’s as if Flavin met Duchamp and had a party. — Tim Stokes

The use of new technologies to express my artistic ideas allows me to explore in two directions: one, with tools used in the medical sciences; and the other, with computers to manipulate images in order to arrive at the work of art per se. The new technologies, as it happens with languages, allow me to communicate my ideas directly to a great number of people, which, in turn, becomes fascinating for me. — Reynaldo Thompson

I've found myself interested in the often blurry boundary between photography and painting. I try to utilize various textures and techniques in either medium as a means of unrestricted visual exploration. The subject matter I usually work with is heavily influenced by popular culture and politics. — Kevin Todora

I have worked with a variety of media over the last five years including a year devoted to inkjet prints on canvas. This body of work originated from a growing interest in how new technology and digital media could inform my studio practice and expand traditional manual techniques. My current project is a reflection of time spent evaluating the vocabulary of manual and digital art practices within painting to launch an exploration into creating a painting language that is both painterly and graphic, representational and nonobjective, without being purely one or the other. — Jeff Yerger