Art show gives physical shape to online images: Transfer Gallery

“Trunks, Stems and Heads,” a new show of art work that gives physical shape to images from the Internet and web inspired ideas opened on Saturday at Transfer Gallery. The gallery is a new venture by one of the organizers of BarCamp Philly, now transplanted to Brooklyn, Kelani Nichole.

The show collects artwork by Rollin Leonard, who explained to Technically Brooklyn that much of the work in the show reflects other works he has made that can only be experienced online. For example, take this detail photo of his work “Dog Pile,” in which the artist creates something like his own pixels, but putting pieces of larger photos onto plexiglass, allowing him to arrange those pieces in different ways. This piece is many pieces, depending on how he arranges it.

And you can see how it reflects the same idea as this piece, “Bicycle Crash,” even though for now there’s no way for Leonard to make these physical pixels work quite like the photos in his online work.

Leonard also had a piece called “Lilia,” in which different parts of a face rotated at different rates. He showed it two ways at the gallery. On a flat screen television and on his wristwatch.

Here’s “Lilia” as a GIF:

Local art journalist, Marina Galperina, of ANIMAL, wrote the following of Leonard in the show catalog: “There’s a strong tendency in our art culture to fetishize the accidental aesthetics of a digital glitch and to abandon the corporeal. There are no glitches with Rollin, just creations that get a bit out of control.”

Leonard lived in Portland, Maine, now, but he was a Brooklynite from 2007 to 2011.

Here are some more photos from the art opening in Bushwick: