Kevin Reuning “Eigenpictures”

Microscope Gallery

[Image: Kevin Reuning "Faces / Flowers (Purple)” (2018) single-channel HD video loop, Raspberry Pi, 3.5” LCD screen, plexiglass, acrylic cement, metal, dimensions variable (detail) - Image courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery]

This event has ended.

Microscope presents Eigenpictures, the second solo exhibition at the gallery by Kevin Reuning – a Brooklyn-based artist working at the intersection of the real and the virtual, the handmade and the computer-generated – featuring new works in mixed media, installation and video.

With a title borrowed from computer vision and generally referencing the base set of images needed by computers for facial recognition, Reuning playfully employs the face and its stand-ins to apply film structuralist and minimalist concerns to digital art in a user-friendly manner. The new mixed media, installation and video works on view often take as both subject matter and material the behind-the-scenes operations involved in 3D animation, incorporating elements such as the software’s pre-rendering drawings, open source visual content, and the physical components of the computer screen itself.

“I started drawing faces because of the relationship between the computer and the face and for the ease and tendency of the human eye to recognize faces, e.g. pareidolia.” – Kevin Reuning

A series of mixed media portraits, each combining two drawings of a simple, silly face illuminate the collaborative nature of digital image-making. The first and smaller image – drawn by the artist within the 3D animation software using the default shapes to create eyes, nose, mouth and others features – is printed with dye sublimation on a small sheet of aluminum. The second image, manually incised by the artist on colored plexiglass, is the iteration of the original face reduced to its cubic form by the software, for optimization purposes, that is visible on the screen prior to rendering.

In new multimedia installations “Faces / Flowers”, Reuning disrupts the act of viewing moving image to reveal it as a technological phenomenon in which “seeing” is actually “seeing through”. In each piece a short video looping on a modified 3.5” computer screen appears solely as white light. The 3D flowers rotating against a solid background only become visible when viewed through polarized filters that also serve as the eyes of a face on a sheet of clear plexiglass suspended nearby.

A single-channel video, “Walk On By (A Cappella)” (2018) features a 3D animation of what could be one of the artist’s plexiglass artworks on the gallery’s walls set to Sybil’s voice-only version of the Burt Bacharach song. The animated artwork is situated in a virtual infinite plane and presented as a proxy for Sybil, with camera shots and movements that attempt to replicate her performance in and pacing of her music videos. The work activates a dialogue with the viewers passing by and comments on the possibilities of exhibition space for a digital artwork, in this case one that did not find its way to a physical form, but exists and is exhibited within a video that is on view.

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Kevin Reuning is a Brooklyn-based artist working in moving image, installation and digital art. His work often involves visual explorations of virtual worlds and sculptures he creates using 3D elements assembled via software or appropriated from the web. Reuning’s work has been previously featured in group and solo shows at the gallery as well as at Boston University Art Gallery, NurtureArt, and Pratt Digital Arts Gallery, among others. Reuning’s work has been featured in Artsy, ArtFCity, Artlyst (UK), and ArtObserved, among others. He released his first ebook “A Few Visuals” in September 2014. Kevin Reuning graduated in 2012 from Boston University with a BS in Film and Science.