_PHANTOM VIBRATIONS

︎JUNE 2019

︎ALYSSA FREITAS
︎KEVIN CLANCY

Featuring wall installations by Kevin Clancy & Alyssa Freitas, the inaugural show plays with our tumultuous relationship to the internet.

“Phantom Vibrations” alludes to a constant, invisible digital presence and our constant need for gratification via its means. The interplay in Kevin & Alyssa's work both pokes fun at and criticizes our dependency on digital space.

Kevin’s cast cats on laptops, hands touching phones and screens reside on grids much like objects for sale at a store. While the cats playfully perch on laptops, the hands extend trying to reach a universe beyond the physical barrier of the screen.Alyssa’s “Open Tabs” are fragmented photographs mounted to happy lights (lights mimicking sunlight) showing disillusioned women set among floating texts from potential suitors. Where Kevin’s work explores the dissonant forces of technology, social media, and screens in contemporary life, Alyssa’s digs into our emotional dependency of phones and the labor of social media maintenance. A deeper look and we find ourselves dizzily drawn into the swirling world of communication while at the same time trapped and controlled by its powers.

Alyssa’s “Open Tabs” is “inspired by stories of fatigue and explores the role of technology as supplementary to baseline needs of warmth and connection. As a multitude of personas functions on different applications sifted through various algorithms, both excitement and upkeep urge the user to engage in a cyclical commodified nature.”
Kevin writes about his work, “These forces have the potential to connect us over vast distances, democratize knowledge, and provide tools for collective liberation, while simultaneously functioning as instruments of power that divide, confuse, and control us. The phone is arguably the most intimate object in contemporary society. It is one of the few objects that nearly every person on the planet has with them at all times; an object that contains our most personal data and desires, and often the first and last thing we look at each day.”