Transmedia artist, Carla Gannis, is perhaps best known for her reinterpretation of art historical masterpieces in contemporary lens, replacing elements with popular iconography--aka, emojis. These tableaus include her piece, Garden of Emoji Delights (2014), a contemporary take on Hieronymus Bosch's famous masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights, and, more recently, Portraits in Landscape (2018), which premiered in Times Square and is inspired by the sixteenth-century mannerist painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo.
In this episode, Carla tells us about her childhood growing up in the Appalachian mountains within a family that encouraged creative expression, her shift from traditional oil painting to digital media, her journey as an artist whose medium was initially received with bias and skepticism, and why innovations like the internet excite her.
-About Carla Gannis-
Carla Gannis, originally from Oxford, North Carolina, today lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BFA in painting from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and an MFA in painting from Boston University. In the late 1990s she began to incorporate digital technologies into her work, and in 2005 she was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Grant in Computer Arts. Currently she is a professor and assistant chairperson of The Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute.
Gannis identifies as a visual storyteller. With the use of 21st Century representational technologies she narrates through a “digital looking glass” where reflections on power, sexuality, marginalization, and agency emerge. She is fascinated by digital semiotics and the situation of identity in the blurring contexts of real and virtual.
Since 2003 Gannis’s work has appeared in over 20 solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Her most recent solo exhibitions include “A Subject Self-Defined” at Transfer Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; “The Garden of Earthly Delights” at The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY and at Kasia Kay Art Projects in Chicago, IL, 2014. In 2013 she collaborated with poet Justin Petropoulos on a transmedia book, installation and net art project entitled published byJaded Ibis Press, Seattle, WA and exhibited at Transfer Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Recent group exhibitions include “Porn to Pizza – Domestic Clichés” at DAM Gallery, in Berlin Germany and “Beautiful Interfaces” at Reverse Gallery, New York, NY.
Features on her work have appeared in ARTnews, The Creators Project, The Huffington Post, Wired, Buzzfeed, FastCo, Hyperallergic, Art F City, Art Critical, Art Report, The Wallstreet Journal, The New York Timesand The LA Times, among others. Recently her speculative fiction was included in DEVOURING THE GREEN:: fear of a human planet: a cyborg / eco poetry anthology, published by Jaded Ibis Press. Her recent speaking engagements include “Let’s Get Digital” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and “Cogency in the Imaginarium” at Cooper Union and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has participated in numerous panels on the intersections between art, technology, education and networked culture.
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Learn more at http://carlagannis.com/
Cover art by Graydon Speace