Galerie Richard, 74 rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris
\nDu 5 septembre au 21 octobre 2020<\/p>\n
Mot de l’artiste :<\/p>\n
Orlando et la tempe\u0302te<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (Orlando and the Tempest) is a series of new virus-modeled artificial life paintings by Joseph Nechvatal<\/strong> that indirectly addresses issues of gender fluidity within our tempestuous viral and social-political times by imagining nonexistent scenes from the 1928 novel Orlando <\/em>by Virginia Woolf (the story of an aristocratic young male poet who transforms into a woman overnight and lives a tumultuous life for 300 years).<\/p>\n Storms have no gender and mean full-blow fluidity. In Orlando et la tempe\u0302te, <\/em>the artist\u2019s ambiguous Orlando avatar is embedded into just such noisy chaotic grounds to the extent that normal figure\/ground relationships more-or-less merge, playing elusively with what is seen, what is suggested, what is repressed, and what is desired. Though viral issues and gender fluidity are culturally and politically topical, those subjects are nothing new to Nechvatal. In 2000, he exhibited Computer Virus Project II <\/em>artworks (with artist\u2019s statements) investigating virtual hermaphrodite complexity in his ec-satyricOn 2000<\/em><\/a> exhibition, and again in his 2002 show vOluptuary: an algorithic hermaphornology<\/em><\/a>. He has continued to use viral and androgynous forms in his work, since. In 2018, he penned a pansexual art theory paper entitled Before and Beyond the Bachelor Machine<\/em> that was published in Arts<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n