Bio | CV | Reviews | Artist Statement

BIOGRAPHY

Carla Gannis, originally from Oxford, North Carolina, today lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BFA in painting from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and an MFA in painting from Boston University. In the late 1990s she began to incorporate digital technologies into her work, and in 2005 she was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Grant in Computer Arts. Currently she is a professor and assistant chairperson of The Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute.

Gannis identifies as a visual storyteller. With the use of 21st Century representational technologies she narrates through a “digital looking glass” where reflections on power, sexuality, marginalization, and agency emerge. She is fascinated by digital semiotics and the situation of identity in the blurring contexts of real and virtual. 

Since 2003 Gannis’s work has appeared in over 20 solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions both nationally and internationally.  Her most recent solo exhibitions include “A Subject Self-Defined” at Transfer Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; “The Garden of Earthly Delights” at The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY and at Kasia Kay Art Projects in Chicago, IL, 2014. In 2013 she collaborated with poet Justin Petropoulos on a transmedia book, installation and net art project entitled <legend>   </legend>  published byJaded Ibis Press, Seattle, WA and exhibited at Transfer Gallery, Brooklyn, NY.  Recent group exhibitions include “Porn to Pizza – Domestic Clichés” at DAM Gallery, in Berlin Germany and “Beautiful Interfaces” at Reverse Gallery, New York, NY.

Features on her work have appeared in ARTnews, The Creators Project, The Huffington Post, WiredBuzzfeed, FastCo, Hyperallergic, Art F City, Art Critical, Art Report, The Wallstreet Journal, The New York Timesand The LA Times, among others. Recently her speculative fiction was included in DEVOURING THE GREEN:: fear of a human planet: a cyborg / eco poetry anthology, published by Jaded Ibis Press. Her recent speaking engagements include “Let’s Get Digital” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and “Cogency in the Imaginarium” at Cooper Union and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has participated in numerous panels on the intersections between art, technology, education and networked culture.

Statement

My work examines the narrativity of 21st century representational technologies and reveals the hybrid nature of identity, where virtual and real embodiments of self diverge and intersect.  I feel akin to past and contemporary artists and writers who uncannily deconstruct rigid notions of reality and perception. The extension of this sensibility with computer-based applications is only natural to me as a reflection upon the Digital Age in which we all coexist… Read More Statement

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