The Digital Overstimulation & Inclusively

WE R LIVING IN A NEW ERA , PUSSY POWER 

by Jasmine Arriaza 

I feel very fortunate to be making art during this time period since before many female artists & nonwhite artists didn't have the chance to take up space in the art world. 

but now that we have our phones & years of people advocating for things to change, I am seeing a rise in female artists being more in the forefront for example Femme Digital, an exhibition celebrating contemporary female-identifying & non-binary artists at the Benjamin J. Dineen llll & Dennis C. Hull Gallery 

I have also participated in this trend in the summer of 2023 by hosting my own all female art shows and even inspiring another artist to do the same in the August of 2023.

The art that has been produced now is a response to social media.

The high pace world with endless images to be inspired or outraged by 

Some artists embrace the digital overstimulation while others want to remind the public to take a deep breathe.

For example, Delcy Morelos who wants you to listen to what the earth has to say. 

I came across her on ArtNews.com.

Delcy Morelos Wants You to Listen to What the Earth Has to Say – ARTnews.com

                   

                                   Delcy Morelos during the installation of El abrazo (The Embrace), 2023, at Dia Chelsea, New York

Delcy is having an exhibition at New York's Dia Art Foundation where she is displaying works of painted soil, she also uses mud as a medium with different colors of brown, ochre, yellow, and black , in the picture above she made a monumental structure of recycled soil from the grounds of Dia Beacon and she embedded hay strand, Delcy encourages the visitors to touch her work, in the brochure for the exhibition she gives instructions on how to do so. 

“Instructions to touch the earth,” it reads, in part: “Let the hands listen, see the smell of the earth / with the fingertips, let its taste be savored / by the skin.”

I feel since we have our phones constantly, we don't really have a connection with mother earth, I feel Delcy is pushing forward the feeling you felt when you were a child digging in your fingers into the soil and smelling the earthy smells that just brought a sense of peace. 

Today now if you're bored you don't really get up and go touch the earth, the soil, or even the leaves on the trees, we all get on our phones to kill the boredom we have. 

                           Delcy Morelos, El abrazo (The Embrace), 2023, installation view, at Dia Chelsea, New York.

“Here, you are entering a space where the land is sacred,” she said. “We are remembering many aspects of the earth that we have forgotten. What I’m doing, in perfuming the works, is creating a way to recall that the earth is feminine.”

 

While researching I saw an article that caught my attention on Hyperallergic the headline stating 

"Are We Really Still Doing White Feminist Shows in 2024?" 

Are We Really Still Doing White Feminist Shows in 2024? (hyperallergic.com) 

 just shows that perhaps art galleries are moving their attention away from white     artists and finally waking up to thousands of years of keeping women of color in the back. 

Another Cool Exbit I discover was in Switzerland in 2022

They had a 90 works made by women. 

It was really cool because on the website they had 360-degree tour of the exhibit 

Works by Women @ Triennale MBAL, Le Locle, Switzerland — PARKETT books and editions on contemporary art (parkettart.com)

Finally,

Selma Selman's Works 

Selma Selman’s Art Is Dirt-Cheap but Worth More Than Gold | Frieze

Selma Selman, Motherboards, 2023, performance, Krass Kultur Crash

Selma Selman, ‘her0’, exhibition view, 2023. Courtesy: the artist and Gropius Bau; photograph: Eike Walkenhorst

  

Selma latest exhibit talks about the "machine realm" and the performance of Motherboards was Selma, her father, and other members of the Roma community pounded away and destroying at electronic equipment.

To me it felt like a protest or riot like being so fed up with technology that you just want to destroy it all 

With all this rage and destructed of the motherboards, Selma was able to find a method to extract gold with scientists with her dismantled motherboards.

‘I learned how to make gold in a non-toxic way,’ she continued. ‘I will teach this to my community… It makes me feel like a female Prometheus.’ 

This statement made me feel in awe since the fact she was able to learn something through destruction and something really valuable to her community since she stated that gold is important in the Roma culture.

Selma Selman, Satellite Dish, 2023, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and Gropius Bau; photograph: Eike Walkenhorst

In the article, Selma says something very interesting about this piece. 

"We delved further into the symbolism of the satellite dish and found ourselves exploring its legacy in former Soviet republics. TV satellite dishes, objects of desire, privately owned, spreading across walls and roofs of buildings like a fungus, fed into a single god-like network – as Selman described it – that was meant to save one from the mundanity of existence."

We come back to how people have been affected by technology, it is really funny how Selman described that it was meant to save us from being bored, going back to Delcy who wants to remind the us to get back to earth.