CARLA GANNIS lives and works in New York City. She received an MFA in painting from Boston University, and is faculty and the assistant chairperson of The Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute. Upon her arrival to New York in the 1990s, Gannis began incorporating digital elements into her painting-based practice. Since then she has eclectically explored the domains of “Internet Gothic,” cutting and pasting from the threads of networked communication, googleable art history, and speculative fiction to produce dark and often humorous explorations of the human condition.
Gannis’s work has appeared in numerous exhibitions and screenings, nationally and internationally. Recent screenings, commissions and solo exhibitions include “Sunrise/Sunset,” Whitney Museum of Art, NY; “Until the End of the World,” DAM Gallery, Berlin; “A Subject Self-Defined,” TRANSFER Gallery, Brooklyn; and “The Garden of Emoji Delights,” Hudson River Museum, Yonkers. Gannis’s work has been featured in press and publications including ARTnews, The Creators Project, Wired, FastCo, Hyperallergic, Art F City, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The LA Times. She has participated in numerous panels and workshops regarding intersections in art and technology, including “Let’s Get Digital” (2014), and “Artists’ Choice” (2016) both at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
In 2015 Gannis’s speculative fiction writing was included in DEVOURING THE GREEN:: fear of a human planet: a cyborg / eco poetry anthology, published by Jaded Ibis Press, and her augmented reality artist book The Selfie Drawings was awarded the Founder’s Award from the 2016 Lumen Prize. Gannis is represented by Transfer Gallery, New York, and DAM Gallery, Berlin.
The Garden of Emoji Delights, 2014 .
Triptych animation, 1080p and 4K video formats. Duration 5:00, looped moving image. Edition 3/3 .
.Archival C-Print mounted on plexiglass, semi-gloss front lamination, 13′ x 7′. Edition 1/3
The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch’s most ambitious work, embodies the conflicts, humor, darkness and absurdity of human, earthly and cosmological conditions. The intention of Gannis’s The Garden of Emoji Delights, 2014, was to mash up popular historic and contemporary sign systems, and to diversify and expand the Emoji lexicon through this process. Emoji are a contemporary glyph system which offer an emotional shorthand for virtual expression. The pleasurable stylizations are ubiquitous worldwide and across generations. Translating iconography of an earlier era using Emoji seems to makes perfect “nonsense.” Gannis produced both a 2D print and moving image version of the “emojified garden.” The static work is a direct homage to Bosch — deeply tied in scale and physicality to the original. The moving image version allowed Gannis to be more dynamic with a hybrid visual vocabulary.