Aysha Hamouda: print(“Hello, World”)

June 3 – September 23, 2022

ILDIKO BUTLER GALLERY
Fordham University
113 W 60th Street
New York, NY

The gallery is open to the Fordham community 9am – 9pm seven days a week. Outside visitors should call ahead to inquire about current admission protocol.

Fordham University’s Ildiko Butler Gallery is pleased to present Aysha Hamouda: print(“Hello, World”). Through the use of ultraviolet light, ultraviolet-sensitive paint, and florescent yellow string, this site-specific installation investigates the idea of “collective dissociation” — a term Hamouda uses to describe the physiological and psychological effects of technologies related to the Internet, information, and the virtual world.

The artist states: “The allures of the Internet are created by algorithmic poems that project/manicure/curate custom realities for each user under the accepted and untamed credo of A Better,(Hyper) Individuated Experience. The web, prized for its global networking, has also come under heat for its main source of capital — its users’ devoted attention or DATA. Meanwhile, the web’s growth of information — factual, fictional, personal — is relentlessly on the rise. The result is a growing Virtual Collective: a cluster of hyper-individuated realities dissociated from one another and yet becoming, somehow, whole.”

Recalling work from the Light & Space movement, Hamouda’s installation plays with optics: The strings and painted wall appear, at certain vantage points depending on the viewer’s height, to flatten into a glowing blue two-dimensional rectangle behind a dense set of yellow horizontal lines. (The effect is even more pronounced when the installation is viewed head on through a camera lens.) From this perspective, every element of the piece exists in a form of controlled unity. However, as the viewer moves physically to other points of perspective, the installation reveals itself as a chaotic web with unexpected depth and complexity.

Titled after Brian Kernigham’s 1972 book A Tutorial Introduction to the Language B., which first introduced “Hello, World” to illustrate variables within programing, print(“Hello, World”) (a Python version of “Hello, World”) explores viewers’ perception of a kinetic, fragmented “whole” and poses the question: How do we construct a sense of grounding when confronted with the groundless? By giving physical form to the primordial skeleton of the virtual world — the rectangle, its pale bluish light — print(“Hello, World”) lays bare our innate human desire to impose structure, systems, and order on a reality infinitely more complex and in constant flux.

Aysha Hamouda (she/they; b. 1991, Switzerland) is an installation and multimedia artist based in the U.S. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in Germany, Switzerland, China, and the United States. In 2019, she was part of Wavelength Reset, an international platform and traveling exhibition based in Shanghai, China. As part of that project, her work Input/Output was shown at the Times Art Museum in Beijing and the Artron Museum in Shenzhen. Hamouda received a BFA from Lyme Academy College of Fine Art in 2014 and an MFA from Syracuse University in 2018.

Sarah Hirzel: Overburden
June 3 – September 23, 2022
LIPANI GALLERY

The gallery is open to the Fordham community 9am – 9pm seven days a week. Outside visitors should call ahead to inquire about current admission protocol.

Fordham University’s Lipani Gallery is pleased to present Sarah Hirzel: Overburden, an exhibition of thirty-five digitally altered, pigment-printed drawings of the stuff we make, use, and leave in our wake in our time on this planet—hatchets, hairbrushes, computers, high rises, oil rigs, musical instruments, fireplaces, drainpipes, cars, boats, bones, furniture, roads, garbage—and of the organic matter that grows up among it.

Hung salon-style in an eclectic array of frames found by the artist in attics, thrift stores, and other out-of-the-way corners, the pieces in this show are by turns poignant, poetic, humorous, dark, and sometimes just simply odd, bringing together the mundane and the momentous in a kind of landfill logic both chaotic and stratified. In one piece, mounted in a small frame of carved black roses, a computer chip sprouts grass; in another, a battle between trumpets and leaf blowers rages; in yet another, the New York skyline morphs into a purple crystal.

Most people are familiar with the term overburden in its verb form—to load with too many things to carry. Fewer know its definition as a noun—rock or soil overlying a mineral deposit, archaeological site, or other underground feature. The works in this show plumb both meanings of the word, conveying the weight of accumulation yet retaining a sense of curiosity about what remains hidden, waiting to be discovered. Indeed, Hirzel likens her creative process to that of a detective searching for clues in a world that feels upside down, inside out, and still, somehow, strangely beautiful.

Sarah Hirzel is an artist and educator based in Massachusetts where she draws, wrangles a chaotic garden, hangs out with her family, and supports student artists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a founding staff member of MIT’s Voxel Music and Arts Innovation Space and curates the MIT Wiesner Student Art Gallery. She is a graduate of the Yale School of Art and Wesleyan University, both located in post-industrial central Connecticut. You can find her in the household accent section of your local thrift shop.