Curatorial Statements

Short statement
There is a standard palette of systems within the fabrication and exhibition of art, ones that cohorts of artists have inherited and worked within across art history. Matrixed Systems assembles artists and technologists working through new ones, building the exhibition itself as one of them. Each work is a live test into what those systems can carry and what they were never designed to hold.

The exhibition is constructed in four layers: a collaborative curatorial framework, an artist umbrella over the room, and three circuits that hold six individual works. Within those six, Matrixed Systems presents an archived exhibition and another exhibition opening within.

Each artist uses technology not as a tool but as the structure through which ideas are built and shared. The matrix here is not a metaphor. It is the system of structures through which the work operates.

Long statement
There is a standard palette of systems within the fabrication and exhibition of art, ones that cohorts of artists have inherited and worked within across art history. Matrixed Systems assembles artists and technologists working through new ones, building the exhibition itself as one of them. Each work is a live test into what those systems can carry and what they were never designed to hold.

Matrixed Systems is constructed in four layers. The first is the curatorial framework, a curatorial experiment where collaboration is the container. The second is an artist umbrella, a single work that spans the full exhibition and whose infrastructure the other works feed into. The third is three systems groupings, with artists representing each part of the circuit. The fourth is the individual artist systems, six works each building a distinct system within their grouping.

🐇 Lena Imamura's Full Spectrum processes artists voice-noting their uncensored thoughts in the weeks before the show. AI processes those notes into two streams, intended narrative and inner truth, and both scroll on LED strips below each work. Audiences use button inputs to indicate which phrases resonate. That data returns to the artists live.

Below Full Spectrum, six artists present systems. Three groupings organize the work: surveillance and record, consumption and critique, infrastructure and legitimacy. Two of those contain other systems inside themselves, both separate exhibitions. The groupings cover the full range of how systems operate on people, what they capture, what they ask of you, and what they decide is real.

🐇 surveillance and record 🐇 considers who is watching, what gets captured, and what a record actually means.
X.A. Li's Consensus installs a webcam in the gallery capturing the interior in real time. A street-facing monitor streams that feed with AI-generated captions disguised as security infrastructure. A second monitor shows the same image buried under every caption the system has ever produced. The work runs around the clock whether or not the gallery is open.
Ana Roman's Permissionless Bodies is a browser-based interactive installation. It locates the body inside automated systems, where data is already being formed before you've made a decision.
TRIBECA GALLERY with quasimatt: on opening night, Against Privacy opens in TRIBECA. The artist and collaborators move through the gallery logging every interaction, every person, every exchange. a show within a show. That record opens as its own exhibition a week later.

🐇 consumption and critique 🐇 looks at what platforms and economies ask of us, and what gets obscured in the asking.
Lea Cetera's Rainbow Lobster uses the aesthetics of food advertising and storefront display to frame what the gallery already is. Spectacle, luxury product, consumption. The piece sits inside that logic and doesn't look away from it. The materials hold the weight. So does the frame around it.
Tina Tarighian's Webzempic is a website that functions like the drug it's named after. You open it when you eat. When the site determines you've had enough, it starts a countdown to a nausea-inducing video. A commentary on diet culture, digital nausea, and the things we pay for to feel bad.

🐇 infrastructure and legitimacy 🐇 asks what makes a system official, what grants it authority, and what happens when those conditions are met by unconventional means.
TRIBECA GALLERY is a fully operational contemporary art gallery on Tumblr. It runs with industry standard hours, openings, and press releases, mirroring gallery infrastructure so precisely that the platform becomes beside the point.
Jason Isolini's Incidental Container stages a group exhibition inside a CubeSmart storage unit for the duration of a free promotional contract. No audience was admitted. The work is a matrix of exhibitions, artworks, documentation, and contracts, reformatting the constraints of art's context itself.

Each artist uses technology not as a tool but as the structure through which ideas are built and shared. The matrix here is not a metaphor. It is the system of structures through which the work operates.