Image courtesy of the artist
above [collecting] below [detecting] above is a multimedia installation by Anna Hogg on view from June 7-27 at New City Arts’ Welcome Gallery that explores mapping and being mapped, surveillance, and the world beyond humans.
This exhibition is presented by The FUNd at CACF and is supported by the Bama Works Fund of Dave Matthews Band at the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation.
New City Arts' Welcome Gallery
114 3rd St. NE, Charlottesville, VA 22902
First Friday Opening Reception
June 7 from 5-7:30PM; Artist talk at 6PM.
Free and open to the public. All ages welcome.
Gallery Hours
Wednesday-Saturday from 10AM-5PM
Exhibition Events
Abstract Flipbook Animation Workshop with Anna Hogg | June 22 | 12-2PM
Visitor Guide
Walking into the gallery, visitors encounter three groups of camping chairs, each positioned around a single projection of a three-channel film (see exhibition statement). The first group, a line of four blue chairs, is oriented toward a large projection of the film on the front right wall. Moving through the gallery, visitors find an illuminated bio-resin sculpture of a Lophelia pertusa (cold-water coral) atop a blue, green, and red base. Beyond that, on the left side of the gallery, three canopy chairs are grouped around a low white panel where a slightly altered version of the film is projected. In the back of the gallery, a pair of lounge chairs are angled to allow a viewer to watch a third variation of the film on a panel suspended from the ceiling. The middle of the gallery walls are lined with three rows of green, blue, and red stenciled, abstract shapes. A low shelf is installed along the middle right gallery wall and holds archival risograph flipbooks.
Please note: The three-channel film includes flashing lights and loud audio. A fragile sculpture is installed on the ground near the middle of the gallery. Please accompany young visitors as they explore the exhibition. Though the sculpture cannot be touched, Anna has provided gloves to allow visitors to gently handle the flipbooks lying flat on the shelf. Visitors are also invited to sit in the camping chairs found throughout the gallery.
About the Exhibition (courtesy of the artist)
above [collecting] below [detecting] above is a multimedia installation that critically engages with surveillance, data collection, ocean mapping, artificial intelligence, and climate change.
The installation proposes a para-science-fictional account of the February 4, 2023 China balloon incident, with key changes to the events in question. When the balloon is struck down off the coast of South Carolina, instead of being recovered by the U.S. military, it sinks to the bottom of the ocean. The weight of the ocean crushes and breaks down the balloon, its solar panels, antennas, and sensors. The balloon fragments drift into the depths of the ocean, where a massive cold-water-coral mound of Lophelia Pertusa has begun to spawn. When the coral larvae settle on the remnants of the balloon, a part-artificial-part-biological cyborgian coral reef comes into being. With each new piece of data the cyborganism collects, it comes to understand the extent of the anthropogenic threat to its ecosystem. Meanwhile, scientists mapping the southeastern Atlantic Ocean start to detect a signal coming from the deep. Due to the Exclusive Economic Zone, any coastal nation has sovereign rights to the 200 nautical miles from land–to explore, exploit, conserve, or manage the natural resources of the seabed, subsoil, and waters above it. The U.S. military establishes a perimeter around the source of the mysterious signal, unaware that they will find an extensive network of coral reefs that are able to detect them, in turn.
The work engages in string figures between issues of surveillance, sovereignty, and recent discoveries about deep sea coral reef ecosystems. The narrative is told exclusively from nonhuman perspectives, with the balloon and the coral reef as its protagonists. As such, the work asks its viewers to think differently, whether to unveil the operations of state and capital to collect one’s information, to understand nonhuman subjects such as a coral reef as having rights, or to consider the larger role that deep sea ecosystems play in our climate futures. The public becomes tacit observer and informal witness of both above and below.
About the Artist
Photo by Rachel Lane
Anna Hogg is an artist and filmmaker whose work indulges in the impossible and the unknowable, exploring these fields as productive sites for play and wild flights of imagination. Allowing truth to be unstable and knowledge to be indeterminate, her work “stays with the trouble” of subjects ranging from the archive, to the cinematic apparatus, to surveillance technology, and especially their relation to memory, knowledge, and regimes of truth. Her work investigates technology’s gaps, dissonances, limits, and failures, beyond which one may speculate alternate ways of knowing and understanding, or even revel in the unknowability of such a space. Grounded in an experimental ethos, her practice spans film, video, animation, sculpture, and installation. In her time-based work, the form of each project is determined by the subject and the intersecting frameworks of documentary, narrative, essay, and poetic film practices. The films transgress the easily defined boundaries of genre and discourse, often existing in multiple iterations and combinations, as part of large site-specific installations, alongside live performance, within sculptures and objects, as well as black box theatre.
Her films have screened internationally, including Prismatic Ground Film Festival, Kasseler DokFest, Chicago Underground Film Festival, San Diego Underground Film Festival, and Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. She was awarded the Jury prize for Best International Work at the 2017 WNDX Festival, and nominated for the Golden Key award at the 2017 Kasseler DokFest. In 2023, she co-directed and co-founded the inaugural event of the Odds & Ends Film Festival with Light House Studio. She holds an MFA in Film & Video from the California Institute of the Arts and now teaches Film at the University of Virginia.
Photos courtesy of Anna Hogg.
Located at 114 3rd St. NE on Charlottesville’s downtown pedestrian mall, New City Arts’ Welcome Gallery supports artists who live in the Charlottesville area. Welcome Gallery exhibitions and programs are made possible by generous sponsors, donors, and grants. Interested in sponsoring an exhibition? Connect with us!