Ghost in the Machine: Video in the Realm of Objects

The Alumni Gallery at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts presents the works of David Dempewolf, Alexandria Douziech, Tyler Kline, and Ashley Wick in GHOST IN THE MACHINE: Video in the Realm of Objects. Subjective worlds of experience, love stories, wandering thoughts, and ruminations on the self and civilization manifest as moving images and moving paintings. Like apparitions, these active, illuminated images haunt the sculpture and installation they live inside or project onto. While the works diverge in their content, they share in their use of video as sculptural and spatial effect, recalling an important work in PAFA’s museum collection - David Lynch’s Six Figures Getting Sick.

David Dempewolf [Cert ‘98] is a Philadelphia based artist whose video works have explored subjects in history, music, time travel, and vision. His animated images move with captured film and built environments recalling daydreams and nightmares.

Alexandria Douziech [BFA ‘14] is a Los Angeles based artist working in documentary film, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Her stories of family, work, and place offer an intimate account of the material effects of colonial legacies and capitalism. Douziech’s research based explorations use object-making and documentation as the primary means for confronting the monolithic challenge of structural inequality. 

Tyler Kline [MFA ‘11] is a Philadelphia based multimedia artist whose works make use of base materials and alchemical processes to translate the chaos of everyday stimulus into the universal. Kline’s videos, installations, and sculptures propose alternate structures of reality where logic is thrown out, and a direct experience with the unknown becomes possible. His use of the moving image often incorporates both digital and analogue maneuvers, transposing the space of one into the other - sometimes resulting in a physical object. 

Ashley Wick [MFA ‘13] is an artist currently living and working in Nome, Alaska. Her animated paintings of intimate exchanges with the self and others are sincere, lyrical, and mysterious. A sing-song lightness in these works find their compliment in the heavy interior space of the subject and the object on view. Ashley’s use of monitors embedded in sculptures cement the implied narratives of love and life into a realm of mythological origin.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website