Jessica Gomula Exhibition Catalog

Jessica Gomula, Infinite Transformations of Desire

April 14, 2008 – May 9, 2008

This exhibition and catalog have been funded by:

University Art Gallery, College of the Arts, California State University Stanislaus

Associated Students Instructionally Related Activities, California State University, Stanislaus

Copyright © 2008 California State University, Stanislaus

All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher.

University Art Gallery

College of the Arts

California State University, Stanislaus

One University Circle Turlock, CA 95382

University Art Gallery Director

Dean De Cocker

Catalog Design: Kristina Stamper, College of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus

Catalog Printing: Claremont Print and Copy, Claremont, CA

Catalog Photography: Courtesy of the Artist

ISBN: 0-9802410-2-2

Cover Image: Tantric GMO and Life Games. 2007. Interactive Installation.

Director’s Foreword

This catalog of Infinite Transformations of Desire, represents the most recent work of Jessica Gomula. In one of the newest medias, Jessica Gomula is pushing the boundaries of an ever growing and expanding genre. With a staggering array of computer skills, Jessica creates traditional prints with complex twists and video projection installations that challenge our view of computer art. Jessica’s research in the use of computers in art is paramount for both students and faculty to the future of learning and understanding of art. The University Art Gallery is very excited to be able to exhibit Jessica’s work.

Many colleagues have been instrumental in presenting this exhibition. I would like to thank Jessica Gomula for the opportunity to exhibit her fascinating work and for her dedication to the catalog and the exhibition. Kimberly De Vries and David Olivant for their wonderful essays, Kristina Stamper of the College of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus for the wonderful catalog design and Claremont Print and Copy for their expertise in printing this catalog.

Much appreciation is extended to the Instructionally Related Activities Program of California State University, Stanislaus as well as anonymous donors for the funding of the exhibition and catalog. Their support is greatly appreciated.

Dean De Cocker, Director

University Art Gallery

California State University, Stanislaus

My work is an interactive investigation of the sexual aspects of our culture. My work intends to be direct, whether the result is imagery of nude bodies and sexual paraphernalia, or purely semantic in nature. I seek to generate an intelligent dialog about sex by combining interactivity, playfulness, and humor. My work intends to be more direct and contemporary than commercial erotica, but less singularly focused than pornography’s sex-objects. It’s about ephemeral sexual cultures, the private spaces around erotic activities, and how these spaces move through and change with time.

I begin my explorations as interactive animations, designed specifically for the intimate experience of online viewing. Through my work with the inter-media performance group Double Vision, I have the opportunity to re-investigate my work for shared, orgiastic experiences as interactive performance installations. And, like taboo snapshots of loved ones, I create printed montages to capture the fundamental essence of the experience of the installations. This imagery is re-incorporated into the original online project, creating a complexly layered experience.

I believe our sexual culture deserves dedicated, creative exploration. Not to document the mechanics of sex, but to tease out the ways it makes our heart race, the way it makes us both embarrassed and ecstatic. Sexual expression reveals of many of our universally shared human experiences. Our imperfect and unconventional bodies are ripe with expressions of honesty, shame, desire, and humor. I use humor within my work to defray the societal tensions that often coalesce around sex.

While sexual prudishness is diminishing, our society still reflects a chasm, simultaneously sexually obsessed and puritanical. While I obviously believe in personal freedoms and political rights, my work seeks to be more open-ended than the propaganda of sexual revolutions. I would rather track the multitude of paths our sexual taboos take; like following the half-hidden veins beneath your lover’s skin. I hope to make the most of this historical transition by creating a playground of discussion around these ironies.

- J Gomula

Playful Frictions: The Uncomfortable and Fascinating work of Jessica Gomula

Kimberly De Vries

These days we seem to confront sex and sexual issues everywhere, even as we have many reasons to be uncomfortable with our bodies and with actually enjoying sex ourselves. This push-pull of arousal and resistance parallels our experience of technology, and the intersection of sex with technology wraps these tensions and frictions into a disturbing yet irresistible web in which we may long to be entrapped. In 2007 critic Josephine Bosma pointed out that “The ‘body’ can [also] be perceived as a collection of systems and fragments of systems. It is at the same time dispersed and whole (Bosma 2007).” In the posthuman world we now inhabit, technology allows the transgression of boundaries between genres and media, between the cerebral and the sensual, while at the same time allowing us to escape from the flesh into personae; avatars; virtual selves that keep us insulated from the messy physicality of sex and of bodies generally.

Jessica Gomula frolics on these boundaries in work that is not easily boxed into categories like new media or conceptual art. Her projects have ranged from websites to interactive installations, from videos to digital prints, all challenging our notions of how each genre is bounded, as well as challenging our ideas about sex on every level. Not only have her projects taken on sexual myths and stereotypes explicitly, but they also question the way we represent sexual subjects. Instead of accepting the sacred/profane dualism still so prevalent in our culture, Gomula shows us sexuality and our bodies in ways that are playful and even silly. Looking at some of her pieces, we experience the awkward feelings that can often be aroused by sexuality itself. In this sense, her work exemplifies conceptual art in that the concepts operate across media, in a sense independent of the manner in which they are executed. And, while influences can be traced to other conceptual artists like Sol LeWitt or to other artists working across digital media, like Jennifer Steinkamp, Jessica Gomula has developed a unique style of her own.

Gomula presents us with works that not only are made up of concepts and processes, but also leave traces that are so aesthetically powerful that we are tempted to fall into the error that may afflict views of conceptual art; confusing the work with its execution. As noted by Florian Cramer, this risk is even more acute with works that depend on computer code or are “installed” online (Cramer 2006). For example, in Gomula’s Knockers, etc. we can “explore” many areas of a breast shown in cross section. By clicking on various areas of the image, we are taken to further details about anatomy, sexual stimulation, breastfeeding, breast enlargement, etc. On the one hand, the animation allows a great density of material to be “contained” in an apparently small space, but on the other, the flatness of the space is reinforced while the seriousness of the content is undermined through the style of illustration and the text printed over the image, numerous slang terms for breasts. This piece is skillfully executed and it would be easy to focus entirely on that, but more interesting is the contemplation of how Gomula has synthesized input from so many cultural sources with a highly interactive piece, so that the possible paths through the content seem limitless. This bounty of possibilities suggests that the meaning of breasts in our culture and the people who have them or like them is similarly infinite.

Other works deliberately focus our attention on these traces and put aesthetic concerns at the forefront, as with some of Gomula’s recent prints. The images taken from Life Games are visually interesting in their own right, reminding viewers of those pictures that look at first like a young maiden, then like a crone. In purely formal terms they are pleasingly active, and even decorative. Looked at more closely we see naked women, DNA strands, and possibly stylized vulvas drifting through

the prints. Orange Haze with Toile plays a similar trick though the visual style is quite different. The title suggests innocent scraps of fabric, yet the picture looked at again also could be sperm swimming along over a background that is far from innocent. These images poke fun at traditional notions of art not in their sexual content, but in their humor, which sometimes might seem sly or clever but in some cases silly, in the way sex itself can feel silly. This irreverence can be found in other artists working today such as Nanette Wylde, or the artist duo Übermorgen and reflects a contemporary skepticism about artistic theories and movements as such; a resistance to taking any of this system of artistic production and criticism too seriously.

Like these contemporaries, Gomula explores how viewers can become integral to a piece. Many of her works incorporate user-generated content such as the many comments about breasts found in Knockers, etc. or the contributions of breastfeeding mothers in B.O.O.B. This is a new spin on generative art that instead of relying only on algorithms and code to generate the specific manifestation of a piece as seen in Jared Tarbell’s work, also draws on the unpredictable contributions of netizens or of visitors to an installation. This hybrid form of generation yields far less predictable, and thus far more interesting results, mimicking the genetically recombinant processes of sex.

Most recently in the interactive installations of Life Games and Tantric GMO, we encounter visually beautiful combinations of color and form; combinations that also tease us by combining couples making love in silhouette with birds, bees, and butterflies. These images are projected onto maze-like hanging cloths through which viewers wander, only to find themselves “covered” in a projection of large swarming sperm, or rows of floating condoms. Again, the aesthetic, even sacred experience wars with a feeling of embarrassment and self-consciousness, and the generated images recombine with input of viewer participation. We lose the safety of our voyeuristic critical distance, and instead become part of the peep-show as our own shadows join those of the silhouetted lovers.

Life Games

David Olivant

You have just finished reading this brief essay on the work of Jessica Gomula. You have looked at the images that it addresses, crisply printed in the catalog that accompanies her recent exhibition. You wish to go deeper and investigate her work in detail, seek it at its source, in the original, the prototypical. You have seen the evidence tantalizingly displayed and now you want the real thing. You check out the artist’s website www.liquidneon.org and there it all is, catalogued and packaged, ready for your perusal.

Where better to start but with Life Games, listed as an interactive installation? The screen blackens and the dance begins. Images float down the screen with hypnotic regularity and you start to vaguely discern mobile colored line drawings of amorous couples, followed by floating repetitions of nude cut-outs, both male and female, some kicking and twitching as if mimicking life. These seem somehow comic and quaint, evoking a disjunction between the fifties-ish nostalgia they evoke, their slightly Pythonesque silliness and the slick digital tour de force from which they emerge. As the imagery becomes increasingly about reproduction and sex further disjunction seems apparent. These images are so detached, so “nice,” so matter of fact, so very understated, even asexual in character—rather like a medical textbook, which you cannot help noticing has appeared as a backdrop to the cascading sperm and DNA helixes—that they seem vaguely at odds with the topic. Hold that thought for a moment.

Have you tried to interact, to fulfill the promise of the title, to be a partner in Life Games? Yes, you can click the button at top left, but what does this actually achieve? Is life not a process that goes on of its own volition, under-girded by some mysterious mathematical progression? And is this really an installation or, and this seems more promising, the evidence of an installation? Back to evidence again. Just when you thought you had the beast trapped in its lair, it has again escaped you. If only you had attended the gallery exhibit where you could have witnessed this installation. Or is it that you are looking for some resolution that is somehow beside the point, or rather that there isn’t a point so much as a constantly inflected, timeembedded surface?

Look again at the computer screen where babies in eggs cascade alternately with nicely packaged contraceptive devices and clusters of penises and vaginas looking for all the world as if they should decorate a shower-curtain. “There is no end of it”, no end to the constant permutations, no end to the screen, which seems to continue indefinitely beyond the top, bottom and both sides, no end to the twitching of legs, to the game of life and your quest for meaning or for the original Gomula work of art. No end, because spatial and temporal succession are the true media of this work for which the digital virtuosity and the imagery it manipulates are merely supports or vehicles. No end because there are probably numerous screens displaying Life Games at any given moment, and because somewhere on numerous hard drives it is always latent, waiting its chance to be performed. What you have is the equivalent of a sort of cyber-Waterlilies (here the flowers are genitals and condoms), a digital Giverny (here the ponds are the implied layers of the screen), an octogenarian Monet on Viagra, a space (rather a space/time) that is at once intimate and public, alluring and distant, complacent and disruptive, a space/time that beggars description or forces it to the endless strings of analogy and metaphor in which the writer of catalogs can so easily indulge, wrapping himself in his own double-helixes, or double-entendres (or should that be quadruple entendres?) when the

application of a good spermicidal jelly might at least thin the flow. “That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:” or to move from over-extended allusion to over-quoted lines of poetry:

“In the knowledge derived from experience, The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, For the pattern is new in every moment…”

Your attempts to locate and define the ultimate Gomula art-object, to interpret meaning, to clarify the metaphors, cite the influences, are all ultimately futile, evasive strategies. Not that meanings and interpretations are to be eschewed, this is not, after all Abstract Expressionism, nothing visceral about it, couldn’t be further off the mark, but that they are all provisional, temporary camps in which the informed response might take refuge but never a citadel of certainty. We, like Jessica, might explore this territory, peer through the layers of condom (see Filthy Clean) or shower curtain, but we can never slash deep into the fabric hoping to plunge our knife into the heart of its soft naked body like Hitchcock’s killer in Psycho. The Dance of the Seven Veils has here become the disrobing of Draupadi in the Mahabharata by her evil in-laws and with each veil removed, another miraculously appears in its place. So for all its celebration of mind-boggling technological innovation, for all its informed engagement with gender politics, Post-Modern identity, quantum mechanics and the endless bewildering chain of Saussurian signifiers, the art of Jessica Gomula ultimately rests in a traditional aesthetic dichotomy. She engages the classical division of the beautifully modulated Apollinian surface illusion that cloaks the Dionysian ecstasies and writhings in a way that, I feel sure, Nietzsche could have appreciated, though he might have been blushing as well.

But, we must remind ourselves that, behind this screen, at the back of all the layers, beneath the live video feed, stands the silhouetted figure of a bearded male, his hands steadying a pistol, as if he might penetrate the layers from behind as we have failed to do from the front. He is the only image that remains stable in the otherwise constant mutations, a permanent hidden threat. We have met him before in Name Games, and now he has wandered off the set, although his backdrop is still with him. Time and again, we have tried to neutralize and emasculate his sinister intentions by clicking on the red barrel end of his weapon, but to no avail. He reminds us of the ancestry of Jessica’s art in the early space invaders games, so amusingly parodied in Sperm Control, as if he might shoot down all of the pristine decorations, as if Life Games is for him merely an opportunity for target practice. He is the question mark that hovers behind the scenes of life’s game, the malign ghost in the machine, the virus in the program, fed exclusively on a diet of spam and phallocentric polemics. He might pull the plug, spray his ammunition across the screen, destroying everything, including by implication ourselves the viewers, while in the background we hear the cynical exploitative chuckle, “ha, ha, ha, ha!”

On the other hand, he could also be the guardian of the secret, the warning against unveiling the mysteries, against pursuing a search that would seek to detach us from the space/time continuum and its endless variations. He could himself represent the fulcrum outside of the system by which it might be understood in some objective, unconditioned attitude. He may be the beast we thought we had tracked to its lair, the minotaur we must seek to slay to have any chance of transcending the virtual aspects of this visual puzzle whose terms can never be unraveled, not least by the ardent writer of catalog essays, endlessly lost in the web of allusion and metaphor generated by Life Games.

Tantric GMO. 2008. Interactive installation of transparent fabric, computer projections, audio. Variable dimensions.

Top left and right: Installation views

Bottom left: Images of computer display

Bottom right: Installation views with audience

Life Games. 2007.

Interactive installation of transparent fabric, computer projections, audio, motion sensors, live video capture. Variable Dimensions.

Top left and right: Installation views

Bottom left: Images of computer display

Bottom right: Installation views with audience

Previous Spread: Installation view of

Name Games. 2007.

Interactive installation of transparent fabric, computer projections, audio, motion sensors, live video capture. Variable Dimensions.

Top left and right: Installation views

Bottom left: Installation views with audience and slang word stickers

Bottom right: Images of computer display

Jealousy’s Triangle. 2007.

3:30 Looping video with audio.

Above: 4 still frames from the video.

Magically Delicious. 2007. 3:30 Looping video with audio.

Above: 4 still frames from the video.

Filthy | Clean. 2008. 4:30 Looping video with audio.

4 still frames from the video.

Happy Holidays. 2005. 1:00 Video with audio.

4 still frames from the video.

Knockers, etc. 2005.

Above: 4 screen captures from online interactive animation.

The Ancient Art of Romance. 2006. Above: 4 screen captures from online interactive animation.

B.O.O.B. (Breastfeeding Outside Our Bedrooms). 2008.

Above: 3 screen captures from ongoing interactive blog with Google-map.

Sex Myths and Tall-tales. 2008.

Above: 3 screen captures from ongoing interactive blog.

EDUCATION

• Master of Fine Arts, Printmaking, Illinois State University, Normal, IL

• Bachelor of Fine Arts, Printmaking, Atlanta College of Art, Atlanta, GA

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

2008

• To the Atlantic and Back Again. Traveling Interactive Installation with Double Vision.

• Dangerous Curve, Los Angeles, CA.

• Highways Performance Space, Los Angeles, CA.

• Trunk Space, Phoenix, AZ.

• ArtsLab, Albuquerque, NM.

• The Warehouse, Albuquerque, NM.

• The Spareroom, Chicago, IL.

• AV-Aerie, Chicago, IL.

• Galley S8, NJ.

• Infinite Transformations of Desire. Solo Exhibition. University Gallery, California State University, Stanislaus, California.

• 2nd Annual California Centered: Printmaking. Merced Cultural Art Center, Merced, CA.

• A Night of Live Art. WORKS, San Jose, CA.

2007

• Love’s Receipts. Solo Exhibition. Print / Photo Gallery, Truckee Meadows Community College, Nevada.

• To Futurism and Back Again. Installation with Double Vision, Yerba Beuna Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA.

• Snap to Grid. Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Los Angeles, CA.

• PAM – Perpetual Art Machine. Traveling Video Installation.

• Chelsea Art Museum, New York, New York

• Scope Art Fair, East Hampton, New York

• WRO07 - XII International Media Art Biennale, Wroclaw, Poland

• House of Campari, Los Angeles, CA

• Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, Inido, CA

• ArtDC art Fair, Washington D.C.

• Scope Art Fair, New York, New York

• Jealousy’s Triangle. Online screening at CultureTv: http://www.culturetv.tv.

• Digital Subjects. Block of the Arts, Coimbra, Portugal.

• To Futurism and Back Again. Installation with Double Vision, Dance Mission Theatre, San Francisco, CA.

• CSU System Print Invitational. Janet Turner Print Museum, Chico, CA.

• Evolution, Print Invitational. Burt Gallery, London, England.

• CultureCatch.com Artist Salon, MacWorld Conference. Red Ink Studios. Performance with Double Vision, CultureCatch.com, and Red Ink Studios. Red Ink Studios, San Francisco, CA.

• Digital Fringe. Horse Bazaar, The Age Melbourne Fringe Festival. Melbourne, Australia.

• Name Game. Rhizome.org Artbase: http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?43121.

2006

• PAM – Perpetual Art Machine. Traveling Video Installation.

• ART|BASEL, Miami, Florida

• Scope Art Fair, Miami, Florida; East Hampton, New York; London, UK

• Split Film Festival, Split, Croatia

• Le Name Festival, Lille, France

• Digit Film Festival, Monticello, New York

• Eight Hours Difference. Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster, England.

• 21/ONE. Performance with Double Vision and Boxcar Theatre, Fringe Festival, San Francisco, CA.

• Snap to Grid. Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Los Angeles, CA.

• FILE: 2006. SESI Gallery, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

• Featured Artist. Women’s Caucus for Art online exhibition, http://nationalwca.com.

• Drunken Boat PanLiterary Online Journal. Web Art Award Finalist, Summer 2006.

• PublicDuck, Episode 16. Online screening. http://www.publicduck.com.

• Lonely Owl and the Game of Life, Byte #2. Performance with Double Vision, CELLspace, San Francisco, CA.

• Lessedra: World Art Print Annual. Lessedra Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria and http://www.lessedra.com.

• 60 Seconds of Play. Get This! Gallery, Atlanta, GA; and Saltworks Gallery, Atlanta, GA; and Forum Gallery, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI and online screening, http://www.drainmag.com.

• Lonely Owl and the Game of Life, Byte #1.5. Performance with Double Vision, ArtSFest Spectra Ball, San Francisco, CA.

• Flux. Works Gallery, San Jose, CA.

• Imaging Ourselves. Online exhibit and book publication through the International Museum of Women. Featured on front page of website, http://www.imow.org.

• Sigmund’s Laundromat. Online screening at CultureTv: http://www.culturetv.tv. 2005

• Lonely Owl and the Game of Life, Byte #1. Performance with Double Vision, Mad Horse, Oakland, CA.

• Survey 2005. Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art, SomArts, San Francisco, CA.

• In the Abstract. Sebastopol Center for the Arts, Sebastopol, CA.

• Eugene Presents. Glowlab’s Open Lab. Art Interactive, Cambridge, MA.

• Happy Holidays. Online screening at CultureTv: http://www.culturetv.tv.

• Works on Paper. Long Beach Arts, Long Beach, CA.

• Lonely Owl and the Game of Life, Byte #0. Performance with Double Vision, WORKS, San Jose, CA.

• Snap to Grid. Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Los Angeles, CA.

• Happy Holidays. Rhizome.org Artbase: http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?34821.

• Lo-Fi Net Art Locator. Online exhibition at: http://www.low-fi.org.uk/.

• A Decade of Web Design. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and http://www.designtimeline.org/.

• Jessica Gomula. Pendu Gallery: http://www.pendugallery.com.

• Museum of the Essential and Beyond That. Online exhibition, http://arteonline.arq.br/festival/festival.html.

PERMANENT COLLECTIONS

• Evolution. Print exchange. Asagaya College of Art & Design, Tokyo; Norwich School of Art & Design; and California State University, Stanislaus.

• Love’s Laundry. Mid-America Print Conference Archives at Perdue University and Ohio University, Athens, OH.

CURATION AND ORGANIZATION OF EXHIBITIONS

• 2006: Film Festival, Chair, National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Oakland, CA

• 2006: Stanislaus County High School Art Exhibit, Judge, Turlock Art Association, Turlock, CA

• 2005: Invited | Invaded, Rhizome Exhibitions: http://www.rhizome.org/art/member-curated/exhibit.rhiz?269

GRANTS AND SCHOLARSHIPS

• 2007 Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Grant, CSU Stanislaus, Turlock, CA

• 2005, 2006 Faculty Mini-Grant Award, CSU Stanislaus, Turlock, CA

• 2000, 1999 Best Print in Show, University Galleries, IL

• 1998, 1997 Friends of the Arts Talent Grant, Illinois State University, Normal, IL

• 1996 Alumni Scholarship, Atlanta College of Art, GA

• 1996, 1995 Academic Institutional Grant, Atlanta College of Art, GA

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

California State University, Stanislaus, Turlock, CA Printmaking and New Media Professor (2005 - present)

Bradley University, Peoria, IL

Temporary Full Time Instructor

Acknowledgements

California State University, Stanislaus

Dr. Hamid Shirvani, President

Dr. William Covino, Provost/Vice President of Academic Affairs

Mr. Daryl Joseph Moore frsa, Founding Dean, College of the Arts

Ms. Susana Gajic-Bruyea, Vice President for University Advancement

Department of Art

Gordon Senior, Chair, Associate Professor

John Barnett, Professor Emeritus

Dean De Cocker, Associate Professor

Jessica Gomula, Assistant Professor

David Olivant, Professor

Dr. Roxanne Robbin, Professor

Richard Savini, Professor

Dr. Hope Werness, Professor Emeritus

Carol Maggard, Administrative Support Assistant

Christian Hali, Instructional Support Technician II

Jon Kithcart, Equipment Technician II

University Art Gallery

Dean De Cocker, Director

Special Thanks

Thank you to DOUBLE VISION for their collaboration in creating an evocative and challenging modern dance and intermedia performance event at this exhibition’s reception.

Thank you to my husband and daughter for their love and support.