Darcy Gerbarg: A Series of Arrangements

DARCY GERBARG

A Series of Arrangements

June 1 - 31, 2023

Essay: Seph Rodney

Q & A: Jennie Bourne

Arts Society of Kingston

97 Broadway, Kingston, NY 12401

Darcy Gerbarg

This catalog was produced to accompany the June 2023 exhibition at the Arts Society of Kingston of the Arrangements Series Paintings by Darcy Gerbarg.

Essay: Seph Rodney

Q & A Interview: Jennie Bourne

Special thanks: Gene Miller

Arts Society of Kingston

97 Broadway

Kingston, NY 12401-6017

https://www.ask4arts.org

ISBN 979-8-89074-927-7

https://www.darcygerbarg.com

https://www.instagram.com/gerbarg

©Darcy Gerbarg 2023

All Rights Reserved

Installation shot EADT, NYC, NY 2016

Artist Statement

Creating new forms of agency to match the altered realities of our time: Presence.

As humans evolve, we find new ways to harness the capabilities of our brains. Access to localities other than one’s own home, “other worlds”, was first physical through travel and visitors’ oral histories and written documents. Analog voice and imaging devices followed, providing news and cultural content gleaned, produced, and shared remotely. Marconi developed wireless over the air communications and “other worldly” information and entertainment spread globally. The digital revolution we are all living in continues to enhance, broaden, and offer wholly new ways for connecting, sharing knowledge, feelings, experiencing “other worlds,” creating and enjoying Art.

VR and AR provide fundamentally new opportunities for people to meet, share, communicate and enjoy purely digital environments, with Digital ART works in Virtual Worlds, or placed in “real world” settings.

It’s about “presence”, experiencing life, interacting with people, seeing, and enjoying art, in a Virtual Environment where one feels oneself there: “present”, where the laws of physics as we experience them on Earth don’t apply. It’s about adding something without corporeal reality to one’s environment, where it occupies visual and perhaps auditory space, along with whatever already exists in the “real world” environment.

I not only create art in a Virtual World but I create new ways to view and enjoy my artworks, in Virtual Worlds, as AR objects and AR Enhanced Paintings on Canvas.

My paintings on Canvas begin as “cropped” images from 3DVR sculptures that I paint with colored light in a virtual reality environment. The paintings on Canvas can also be experienced with their AR enhancements. This enables viewers to have the interactive/immersive experience of standing and walking around in the 3DAR light sculpture as it surrounds them in the room, in front of the painting.

Darcy Gerbarg May 2023

Darcy Gerbarg Working at the Future Reality Lab New York University, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYC, NY

Floaty Arrangement mixed reality on canvas

40 x54

2023

Call Them Flowers

Imagine designing a flower arrangement — with the sweep of your hand creating a languorous petal, with a few turns of your wrist knitting together an ovule, your hand and eye harmonizing to form the peduncle of each bloom, the receptacle resting on that stalk, and the anthers and filaments you might litter here and there. How would you make a start? For your designs to resemble what appears in the actual world they would need to be grounded in the physical experience of gardens, handling the roots and stems, the smell of earth rising and swirling round you, your hands ascertaining moment to moment how to make something grow. This is where Darcy Gerbarg began.

Gerbarg grew up in the Catskills and she has a greenhouse there. She has planted dozens of trees, many, though not all of them fruit trees or flowering trees and has several flower and vegetable gardens. She has long cultivated living things, plants and horses mostly. Years ago, while living in Japan, she discovered the simple, minimalist beauty of Japanese ikebana. During the pandemic her interest in ikebana was rekindled when she found online videos detailing the practice. The tradition is over a thousand years old, dating back to the Heian period (794–1185) in Japan when floral arrangements were made to decorate altars. It is a slight irony that the term “ikebana” roughly translates as “making flowers alive.”

Working with plants and vegetables for this long, the artist intimately knows their limitations. They are constantly thirsty, or they are easily overfed. They sometimes wilt in direct sunlight but may go limp in too much rain. The lips of their petals hold their natural shape curling away from death until they suddenly, inexplicably give into it, their colors darkening like they’ve been drowned. They fail to hold themselves aloft. They get blown to bits by cruel weather.

The expressionist painter in Gerbarg wanted flowers she could hold on to. Or rather, they just came into being when she decided to create a new kind of studio space for herself, inside the virtual reality realms of Oculus Quest. With some experimentation she found that working with “Tilt Brush” software, which is available on the Oculus Quest platform, she could create her own gardens in that virtual landscape.

Gerbarg uses Unity software to essentially make three dimensional objects within the VR environment. Using Tilt Brush she begins with a choice of brush size, and paint color, against the backdrop of a black void. She works at room size, her base between 12 and 14 feet across. This is where the life of her gesture begins: making a base vase for the arrangement. Then, given the freedom of virtual space she moves in, through and around that base, even goes beneath it, all the time painting with her whole body, arms flung skyward to create filaments, crouching down to anchor her stalks, making a back handed flourish to curl a petal above her head, standing up to measure the stamens against her own height. Those ikebana videos she viewed suggested that in real life the arrangements could be constructed in such a way that nothing would hold the flowers and interwoven plants in place except how they fit, lock into, and lean on each other and the structure into which they have been placed. Of course, in the virtual world, the flowers do not need to follow those strictures. They do not obey the dictates of weight: they can defy gravity; they can be rootless.

The next step in Gerbarg’s process has to do with taking pictures of the 3D models she has devised. Gerbarg has a digital camera inside the software package that she uses in virtual space. In this too, the artist has practically limitless options for the perspectives she can take on the objects: She can capture images from above or below or go inside the structures and take images of their internal makeup. Each of these images is in essence a cropped section of a much larger whole. This is a technique she says she picked up many years ago, from Larry

Poons, on a studio visit with Clement Greenberg. She recalls Poon’s technique as consisting of hanging canvas floor to ceiling all the way around the studio. Then Poons would fling paint at the hung material and, after allowing the paint to dry, would walk around the studio with a knife, cutting out the vignettes that most worked as paintings for him. Similarly, Gerbarg takes bits and pieces of the 3D models she’s created, but then, using Photoshop, she may change the colors or re-crop them or alter the images aspect ratio. Everything is subject to revision.

When artists and patrons talk about “digital art” they often allude to work that began in the physical world as an oil painting or charcoal drawing or sculpture made of bronze, which is then dragooned into the digital realm. But Darcy Gerbarg starts inside the digital and navigates her way back to us bringing with her a visual record or her own animated body painting in space.

In the work “Peony Dance”, 2023, you can see the profligate use of her expressionist agency. The plants with deep purple petals which fade into chartreuse towards their tips seem rooted in a reflective pool in which the flowers’ reflection iridesces as waves waft outward from them. Other leaves are deep indigo tendrils that sweep and dive from the flowers center as if abandoning their posts. Still other leaves of dark, forest green seem like there are barely there, a sketchy brushstroke left inconclusive. And the filaments have only a passing relationship with the golden anthers that swarm around the flower like symbiotes seeking a host.

What you see in this series of paintings are imaginative arrangements that read as digital blossoms, but a better word might occur to you in the moment of seeing them. They represent the experience of the artist wandering in a landscape of darkness that she knows she can make bloom with displays of astonishing, refulgent color. They are experiments; they are offshoots of inward exploration; they are consummately digital inventions — but we might call them flowers.

Seph Rodney 2023

Peony Dance-O mixed reality on canvas 48x48 2023

Q & A Interview with Jennie Bourne

Jennie asks Darcy some questions and here are some of the answers

I'm calling my latest paintings the “Arrangements Series” because they were created as a kind of arrangement of things that look like flowers. I'm fascinated by some of the Ikebana videos on Instagram.

This particular kind of Ikebana flower arranging requires that all the parts of the arrangements have to be self-supporting or leaning on each other. I just loved the spaces that were created once these pieces were put together. You don't arrange it in your hand by putting one piece in and then adding another. It's not a bouquet. It's actually a way of putting things from nature together to create something that has threedimensional interest.

Many years ago I did study Ikebana in Japan, but it wasn't this kind of Ikebana.

I started making them and taking pictures of them with my digital camera in a virtual world and turning them into paintings. They are very abstract and they incorporate things that lead one to believe they are something they already know, until they start to look more closely. Because in fact they're not flowers they are brushstrokes. And they're not even brushstrokes because it's digital.

It's like a painting that doesn't use paint, it uses colored light. I crop them by using a digital camera. In the end they wind up on canvas.

Once I've created one of these 3D Unity models in a virtual world, it’s usually about twelve or so feet long and about 8 tall. As I make the models, I walk around, in and through them photographing parts from many perspectives.

I frame little vignettes from different points of view. If you had a flower arrangement on the table and you looked at it from one direction, it would look like one thing, and if you walked around it, it would look like something else. Of course, it’s different because the arrangement is larger than life. You can go under it and look up through it. So there are a lot of different views. I might take 50 or more snapshots then decide which ones I want to develop into paintings.

There is no language to actually label what these things are in the virtual world. I create them with Unity software. I'm using what's called a paint system, named Tilt Brush. It emulates brushstrokes digitally. So the experience of using it is very similar to painting with brushstrokes. But instead of painting with physical media, you're painting with colored light.

So I'm never trying to simulate the effect of three dimensions on a two-dimensional picture plane. I'm actually in a three-dimensional environment, where I can paint in all directions around myself. I call it painting with colored light, but we don't have three-dimensional paintings. There is no such thing as a three-dimensional painting. If it's three-dimensional it's sculpture. But is it a sculpture? Well, it's a 3D model.

Unity makes 3D sculptures using mathematics. But if you call it a sculpture you have to say what it's made of, and it's made of colored light brushstrokes, which are not really brushstrokes, because there aren't really brushes. So it's a bit difficult to explain.

It's very gestural, the same way Abstract Expressionism is gestural. I use my whole body and my arms and the motion and the velocity of the stroke affects how the stroke looks. It affects how wide or dense it is, the way it would with paint. But it's not tactile. It's instantaneous. There's no drying time. And if you make a mistake, you can erase it.

Going from 2D to 3D is like the difference between snorkeling and scuba diving. Snorkeling, you stay on the surface, you look down at the water. Scuba diving, you are in it, and it's all around you.

The models have no size. Even though I paint it in one size I can make it little or I can make it really gigantic.

They are so big, when I put them in my virtual world, you can go inside them as an aviatar and fly around and in them.

In creating the "Arrangements," my goal wasn't to have a finished wonderful sculpture. It was to create something visually interesting and colorful. I found that unconsciously I started coming up with things that ended up looking like gigantic flowers.

I take a lot of snapshots. Then I have a lot of material to make paintings out of. And then as I'm working in Photoshop, I explore other painterly options.

Every sculpture has a whole file of all the data that's part of that sculpture.

I kind of got lured into Immersive / Interactive art when I showed my work in Los Angeles. I had quite a few large paintings and people would stand in front of one painting in particular and stare at it. They kept saying “I want to walk inside of this.” They could feel the three dimensions. So, Gene and I figured out how to create Immersive/ Interactive experiences, where people could put on goggles to be in one of our 3DVR worlds. This way they could walk inside and around my 3D sculptures, much like I do, when I make them.

So we've done a number of those, and we've created virtual worlds where you can fly around in the sculptures. As the technology evolves, you can do other things. I was able to take these 3DVR, Virtual Reality Sculptures, as AR, Augmented Reality, objects using my phone, into the real world and have that 3D model be visible in any place in the room or outside.

I did a whole series called "The Inside and Outside Pictures," made by taking the 3D model someplace and taking snapshots through it, and parts of it, in the real world. It was an interesting way to incorporate abstract painting with realistic painting, as some kind of photography.

Now it's not really photography. There is no film. It's digital end to end. When I say it's digital from end to end it means the entire creative process is digital, then I print it out digitally. This is unlike most art that people call digital, which is created in a traditional physical medium, then photographed and digitized.

Flirty Arrangement mixed reality on canvas

32x32

2023

Hot Arrangement mixed reality on canvas

32x32 2023

Tentative Arrangement mixed reality on canvas

Peony Dance-B mixed reality on canvas

48x48

2023

To Port Arrangement mixed reality on canvas

32x32 2023

Starboard Arrangement mixed reality on canvas

32x32

2023

Me Too Arrangement mixed reality on canvas 32x32 2023

Weather Arrangement mixed reality on canvas 44x54 2023

Peony Stance mixed reality on canvas

48x48 2023

Sunset Arrangement mixed reality on canvas

44x54 2023

Mystic Arrangement mixed reality on canvas

Ethereal Arrangement mixed reality on canvas

Exhibitions and Presentations:

2023 ASK, Art Society of Kingston, 2 artist exhibition

2022-2023 ART.NOW EXHIBITION 2023, Hearst Galleries, NYC, New York

2020 –2023 Darcy’s Painting and Sculpture Garden, AltspaceVR (AltspaceVR shut down 03/2023)

2022 NEW YORK STUDIO SCHOOL OF DRAWING, PAINTING AND SCULPTURE: 2022 Alumni Online Exhibition, NYC, NY

2022 MIAMI RIVER ART FAIR 2022, Art Basel Miami week, Miami, Florida

2022 ARTBOX.PROJECT MIAMI 3.0, Art Basel Miami week, Miami, Florida

2022 TECHSPRESSIONISM - DIGITAL & BEYOND, Southampton Art Center, New York

2022 International Fine Art Cannes Biennial 2022, Cannes, France

2022 International Contemporary Art Biennale Basel, Basel, Switzerland

2022 International Art Fair Carrousel du Louvre, Paris France

2022 ASK, Art Society of Kingston, Kingston, New York

2022 ROOST STUDIOS PRESENTS “VERDANT”, New Paltz, New York

2021-2022 ART GATE INTERNATIONAL 2022, EADT Gallery Exhibition, ArtGateVR, Metaverse ArtGateVR Biennale 2021, ArtGateVR, Metaverse

2021 CODAsummit 2021 - CODAworx, Scottsdale, AZ, November

2021 DRHA Annual Conference - Online and Berlin, Germany, September Digital Matters: Designing/Performing Agency for the Anthropocene

2021 Art Gate 2021, EADT Gallery, Darcy Gerbarg, Techspressionist paintings, April

2021 Recto VRso Laval-virtual Festival, online, April

https://rectovrso.laval-virtual.com/en/2021-artworks/ (catalogue)

Musée-École de la Perrine “Virtual exhibition/real exhibition: online art”, Laval, France, July

2021 “Along the Rivers Edge”, Thousand Islands Art Center, Thousand Islands, New York

2020 Hamptons Virtual Art Fair, September 2020

2020 CADAF International On-Line Art Fair, June

2020-2021 BRCvr, Burning Man online, Darcy’s Painting and Sculpture Garden, AltspaceVR

2019 Point of Contact Gallery, “Time Changes Everything”, Syracuse, New York (catalog) (Scheduled to open Summer 2024 Lubin House, NYC, New York)

2020 The National Arts Club and NYVR Meetup, AltspaceVR, Darcy’s Painting and Sculpture Garden AltspaceVR

2019 Castelli Art Space, one-woman exhibition, Los Angeles, California

2019 CADAF Contemporary and Digital Art Fair, Miami, Fl, December

2019 The Mercantile Gallery, Syracuse, New York

2019 Woman Made, Chicago, Illinois

2018 - 2019 Mark Borghi Fine Art, Palm Beach, Florida, Hamptons, New York

2018 The Yard - Columbus Circle, NYC, New York

2018 Clio Art Fair, NYC, New York

2017 - 2019 Mishkin Gallery, Small Works Baruch College, NYC, New York

2017 - 2019 Catskill Art Society Member Exhibitions, Livingston Manor, New York

2017 FOCUS: “Technology: Friend or Foe”, WAAM Curated, Woodstock, New York

2017 Woodstock Art School, Woodstock Monoprint Invitational Exhibition, Woodstock, New York

2017 Henning Studio Show, 4W 43rd Street, NYC, New York

2016 - 2018 High Line and West Chelsea Artists Open Studios, NYC, New York

2016 EADT, Experiments in Art and Digital Technologies, Creative Technology Week, NYC, New York

2015 Gallery440, Juried Exhibition, “Off the Press”, Brooklyn, New York

2015 WAAM Juried Exhibition, Woodstock, New York

2015 University of Pennsylvania, Juried Alumni Exhibition, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

2014 - 2015 Berkley College Gallery, “Open Studio Artists: Henning Screen-print Workshop”, Brooklyn, New York

2014 Art Silicon Valley, San Mateo, California

1990 United States Cultural Center Gallery, one-woman exhibition, USIA, Reykjavik, Iceland

1989 “Electronic Print” Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, England

1987 - 1988 “Computer Assisted: The Computer in Contemporary Art” Freedman Gallery, Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania

1986 “artware” Kunst und Elektronik, Dusseldorf, W. Germany

1984 Cadre, Computers in Art, Design and Research, San Jose, California

1980 - 1986 SIGGRAPH Art Shows, Seattle, WA; Dallas, TX; Boston, MA; Los Angeles, CA; other

Museum Exhibitions:

2019 Palos Verdes Art Center, “Cover These Walls: International Design Entries ”, juried competition, Rancho Palos Verdes, California

1992 SMCA Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

1991 -1992 The Computer Museum, Boston, Massachusetts

1991 “Digitized Manipulated: National Exhibition of Computer Images,” Sangre de Cristo Arts Center, Pueblo, Colorado

1990 “Infinite Illusions: The World of Electronically Created Imagery”, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

1989 Fine Arts Museum of Long Island, one-woman exhibition, New York (catalog)

1988 “Computers and Art”, IBM Museum of Science and Art, New York City, New York

1987 “Computers and Art”, Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York

1986 San Jose Museum of Art, CADRE Exhibition, San Jose, California

1984 Siemens Museum, München, Germany

1984 Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx, New York

1983 ‘Electra,’ Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France

1981 “Ways in Space, New Art Technology,” Downey Museum of Art, Downey, California

Art Exhibition Catalogues and Books:

2022 The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, NYC, New York

2022 Techspressionism: Digital and Beyond, Southampton Center for the Arts, Southampton, New York

2021 A Biography of the Pixel, Alvy Ray Smith, MIT Press, Boston, Massachusetts

2019 Time Changes Everything, Point of Contact Gallery, Syracuse, New York

1989 Darcy Gerbarg, Paintings and Prints 1980-1989, FAMLI, Fine Art Museum of Long Island, Hempstead, New York

1981 New Works in Clay III, Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York, August 14- October 18, 1981

Public Art Commissions:

2017 Upstate Cancer Center Artwork Project, Syracuse, New York

Education:

BA University of Pennsylvania

New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture

MBA Stern, New York University

https://www.darcygerbarg.com

©Darcy Gerbarg 2023