Text by CLOT Magazine
The Whitney has commissioned LaTurbo Avedon to create the latest Sunrise/Sunset series show on the Whitney Museum website. Using the museum’s website as the exhibition space, the internet art series asks artists to disrupt the website’s interface twice a day for just under a minute, once at sunrise and once at sunset. Even if only for a moment, these works use the institution’s website as a platform to make space for digital art. Christiane Paul, adjunct digital art curator at the Whitney Museum, organised the series.
LaTurbo Avedon’s show, Morning Mirror / Evening Mirror consists of fourteen videos played through the frame of a virtual golden mirror that is overlaid on the museum website. Appearing like a portal, the videos depict living spaces, presumably inhabited by the artist’s virtual selves. Much of LaTurbo Avedon’s work concerns virtual mirroring, reflections, and world-making. The mirror in this series behaves as a portal to another world and a surface for reflection, as it exists on our 2D computer screens. The piece blurs the line between our physical and virtual worlds.
While most of the world has been confined to tight living spaces this year, our routines and movements have been disrupted. Morning Mirror / Evening Mirror calls into question the worlds we have created due to our social isolation and digital communication. LaTurbo Avedon’s work is usually guided by self-identity, digitization, and world-building themes. They exist as an avatar who renders and explores different identities and futures, questioning authorship and virtual space preconceptions.
LaTurbo Avedon’s work focuses on the ever-changing and interactive relationship between users and virtual experiences through the Internet, exhibition spaces, or performance. Their digital characters and creative environments ask us to consider the potential of virtual creation. They currently curate Panther Modern, an online exhibition site that allows artists to imagine and fabricate pieces specifically designed for the Internet.
To view the Morning Mirror / Evening Mirror series, be anywhere on whitney.org during sunrise or sunset EDT.
