Alchemical Transformations
Brian Bartz + Blue McCall + Kelley O’Leary

Well Well Projects
Portland, OR

June 3- June 25, 2023

“What if the truth is in its material configuration? What if the medium is really a message?”
– Hito Steyerl

It is fitting that the birth of the internet happened here – along the West Coast, the edge of westward expansion. Colonialism’s insatiable hunger for space extends into a seemingly ethereal cyberspace. Yet, digi-space requires physical space around the globe to operate. The continuous extraction of Earth’s resources and exploitation of bodies, lives, and spirits for labor is shrouded in abstraction. This abstraction continues colonialism’s destructive and murderous project in cyberspace. This exhibition investigates some of the many ecological entanglements and physical absurdities of life in the digital age. Works in Alchemical Transformations operate in the analogue while referencing the digital, pulling back and forth between the two vernaculars in constant tension. Multidisciplinary artists Brian Bartz, Blue McCall, and Kelley O’Leary create glitches in the static categories of identification imposed on our lives through digital networks. By following earth’s materials and bodies, Alchemical Transformations shows that the divide between digital and physical is not so binary, but rather a permeable slippage.

Berkeley-based sculptor Brian Bartz’s works turn digital devices inside out, transforming them into bizarre machines to imagine alternative technological futures. These speculative objects flatten the conceptual space between the geological extraction demanded by the network and the self-exploitative tendencies its technologies foster in users, understanding both to be processes of terraforming (earth-shaping). Chicago-based visual artist and choreographer Blue McCall offers a series of stills from rotating images depicting stacks of bodies in a terminal-black void. QR codes move viewers through the image into digi space, where stacked dancers’ bodies become post-digital sculpture spinning in 360 degrees. The series is made in collaboration with Proof of Body, a Portland-based photography studio and love project by Gabriel Noller and Madison Hames, and with dancers from Blue’s queer/trans dance ensemble, Touch System. The exhibition is grounded by Bay Area-based artist Kelley O’Leary’s crystallized e-waste rocks and claybody sculptures made from earth samples collected from multiple data storage centers located in deserts throughout the American West. O’Leary offers speculative artifacts and drawings to reveal hidden geographies embedded within cyberspace, pointing towards the immensity of Earth’s extraction across a geological timescale.

Teaming up across disciplines and distance, Bartz, O’Leary, and McCall – with the help of local collaborative projects Proof of Body and Touch System – push back against the rigid and structured hegemony of time and space on post-internet Earth. The network, to which we are all beholden, imposes on human life a compulsory duty to quantify our identities and structure our time into small packets of linear information with which we can be repackaged as commodities. The works in this show are critical of colonialism’s insistence on progress through further extraction and quantification. Instead, the show proposes a much messier, entangled digital ecosystem. A place located in a flawed technological present, where time unfolds queerly in ways that do not always make sense, in analogue space that somehow maintains an ethereal quality.

-BB, BM & KO

installation photography: Mario Gallucci