Plasticity at Woollahra Gallery opening April 17

My latest exhibition Plasticity, opens at Woollahra Gallery Sydney on Wednesday April 17th 2024, from 6-8pm.  

The exhibition is inspired by Alain Resnais’ 1959 film Le chant du Styrène (‘The Song of Plastic’), and the behind-the-scenes labour of digital work. The exhibition will include large-scale digital prints and a 3D-modelled and animated short film that explores the contemporary value placed on plasticity of form, liquidity of assets, and hybridity between virtual and real worlds. This is set against the use of motion capture to introduce the human element of fragile and contingent bodies. Much like the hype surrounding the technology of plastic in 1959, the socio-environmental impacts of the emerging technologies of the 21st Century are likely to play out in ways we cannot predict.

Erica Molesworth works with video, 3D-animation and installation. She completed her Bachelor of Visual Art at Sydney College of the Arts, and her Masters at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, USA. Her work has been exhibited globally, including at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, Dallas Medianale in Texas, the Lishui Festival in China; the John Fries Memorial Prize in Sydney, and Channels Video Festival in Melbourne. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies in the US, including at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Vermont Studio Center, Lighthouse Works NY, and Massachusetts MoCA Studios.

Artist talks will take place on Saturday 20th April, and the exhibition continues until May 12th. Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf is located at 548 New South Head Road, Double Bay NSW, and is open Wednesdays-Sundays excluding public holidays.  

Plasticity, 2024, animated film stills by Erica Molesworth 

Motion Capture Work-in-Progress:

April 2023: Below is the latest update, including footage of the threatened wilderness at Mugii-Murum Ban (NSW) combined with a gentle human gesture,  and a 3D-landscape inspired by these combinations. I also include a test install at a recent residency.

*more photos on instagram

March 2023: So far I have built the principle model and rigged it for motion capture data: below is a test render of the base model (based on me) with test motion capture data linked. The final 3D products will have the glitches removed and have materials and texures added. They will then be composited into live action video. The gestures used in the final work will reflect non-extractive relationships with  the environment and movements that promote collective action. 

Lighthouse Works 10th Anniversary Exhibition & Screening, September 2022

I'm debuting my film, Cabin Fever AI Love Story, partially shot during my residency at Lighthouse Works on Fishers Island, NY, in LW Shorts this September 23-25.  Cabin Fever is a pandemic-fueled fever dream about an Artificial Intelligence who accesses  the artist's hard drive and uses their files to make a video... Unfortunately, the AI has been trained on the unhealthy, chaotic spaces of the internet, so things become a little unhinged! 

In the short clips from Cabin Fever below,  a 3D-modeled version of my own face, rigged for facial motion capture, brings to ‘life’ some poetic text written by an artificial intelligence (GPT-2) trained in the English language and health-related spam emails.  Like much of my work, it crosses back and forth between what is considered the digital world (AI, CGI, etc.) and what is considered the 'real' world -- me as an embodied artist, my voice, my daily interaction with capitalism and health. 

This film combines computer-generated illusion with live-action footage that depicts moments that show the harm of business-as-usual as well as moments of its upending, such as acts of collective refusal.  In the second clip below, I worked with fellow residents at Wassaic (NY) to stage a moment of collective action (or inaction) that I had been dreaming about – a kind of spontaneous, Bartleby-inspired walk-out to protest the Trump administration. 

The Virtual Void: a Panel in VR with Fred Scharmen, Elisabeth Nicula and Erica Molesworth

JUNE 19 2022, 11:00-11:45am PST (2pm EDT) *recording of the event here!

Please join us in Erica’s Utopia Spa in the Art Camp Commons:

https://hubs.mozilla.com/ojgaGLm/utopia-spa-2

Please join us online for a conversation in Social VR: in a moment when NFTs dominate discussion in art circles, what role can art play in interrogating extractive environmental practices? When all the money and attention is following space ventures and the metaverse, can we make creative use of technologies in ways that do not simply replicate the void? Perhaps emblematically, this discussion will take place in Virtual Reality – itself the latest void to seduce with a promise of emptiness and possibility. Erica’s work has long struggled (hard) with the lure of Utopia and the strange tendency it has to be dystopian. Log on to Erica’s VR Art Camp space, Utopia Spa, as we puzzle out the possibilities of community, art, architecture, and relationships with non-humans in the void…

Highly recommended reading to facilitate a deeper discussion:

Elisabeth Nicula, "The Artist is the Void"

Fred Scharmen, Space Settlements, Ch. 1

Elvia Wilk, “A Non-Universal Universe: Eco Art and the Art of Prehistory”

*I also recommend this Meta promo for the “metaverse”

and its own social virtual reality “Horizon”

below image: screenshot of event

LMCC Governors Island Residency: Fall 2020 🏝️

It was a dream to spend September through December 2020 on Governors Island as a resident of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Art Center.  See below for an excerpt of my artist talk about what I worked on while a resident:

Recent Screenings 📽️

July 2019

• Competitive Disadvantage, curated by 77 Mulberry, Mery Gates, Brooklyn, NY

• Dallas Medianale Film Festival, official selection, Dallas TX

NARS & MASS MoCA Residencies 2019🍎

Monday, December 17, 2018

I have just moved to New York City and have been accepted to 4 residencies in the first part of 2019 to pursue the final exhibition of my project 'New Earth' and begin a new project around islands and climate change:

• NARS Foundation International Residency Program (with US-based artist fellowship) in Brooklyn, NY [studio view below].

• Banff Centre Artist-in-Residence (with financial support) in Canada

• Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA [pop-up exhibition view below]

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