Pattern Recognition: Art and Music Videos in Middle Tennessee

Pattern Recognition brings together videos and digital photographs by artists working in Middle Tennessee. Absorbing and unexpected, the works in the exhibition resist traditional notions of linear narrative. Instead, they explore the technical capacities of digital media to alter our sense of time and reality, showing natural and computer-generated patterns that weave, ripple, and flow in unpredictable ways. Each artist employs slow pacing, fluid transitions between recognizable and abstract imagery, and harmonic or asynchronous sound to induce feelings of reverie, pleasure, and mystery.

Artists in the exhibition include McLean Fahnestock (faculty, Austin Peay State University), Morgan Higby-Flowers (Vanderbilt University), Joon Sung (faculty, Western Kentucky University), and John Warren (faculty, Vanderbilt University). Fahnestock takes as her starting point the symbolism of the sinking ship, with the eternal ocean portrayed as embracing that which belongs to it. Higby-Flowers, Sung, and Warren employ digital manipulation and animation to produce pulsating abstractions that dissolve and morph with hypnotic intensity. Together, these works show realms in which narrative clarity is discarded in favor of formal patterns that show a world outside of time.

Exhibition overview from museum website.