The exhibition Doubly So, curated by Deputy Director of PLAYGROUND DETROIT, Samantha Banks Schefman for Center Galleries at the College for Creative Studies is focused on duality of persona and perspective, and its relation to the ontology of digital media. The show, which opens March 18th, features photography, video, and sculpture.

Artists working with virtual reality are creating immersive multi-disciplinary environments that simulate 3-D concrete existences, ideas, and images. The intersection between science, art, and technology creates the effect of an interactive three-dimensional world in which the objects have a sense of spatial presence. These objects are bi-products of human’s relationship to technology, the internet, and the idea that not only are we being observed but also we have the ability to be the surveyor.

Leaning toward Object-Oriented Ontology, the items projecting digital media become immediately humanized by the images in the videos of internet-darling and “selfie”-queen Amalia Soto aka Molly Soda. Her digital artwork and social media following has allowed for the creation of a persona through which she can “invoke insight on contemporary feminism, perversion, culture, and identity.” Molly Soda has received international recognition since her video Inbox Full was a highlight of the world’s first digital art auction held at the reknown Phillips in 2013, exhibiting solo internationally for the first time at London’s Annka Kultys Gallery November, 2015. She shared her use and view on the artful “selfie” image on NPR’s All Tech Considered in July, 2015, and often questions the state of “Self” in captions of posted images for her social media following.

Often noting her given dual identity, Iranian-American artist Sheida Soleimani’s tableau photography reflects the “identity formed by personal memories and stories my parents expressed to me as a child.” Raised by political activists who, after facing imprisonment, immigrated throughout Europe and to America in order to escape the revolution and Ayatollah’s totalitarian regime; “belonging and non-belonging” shaped her upbringing, perspective, and narrative.

I’m interested in the physicality of the photograph — as a visceral object and translator of memory and suppressed narratives. […] Through incorporating multiple layers, the lexicon can be read and refashioned by the viewers’ ideologies, creating images that remain coeval, while acknowledging former origins.

Her latest work focuses on the astonishing numbers of women put on trial and (often by false accusations) hanged to death under the rule of Rouhani (2013-2015). With strict government control over the internet and geo-tracking through social media, often the only outlet for voices speaking up against Iran’s totalitarian regime is Twitter (often a source for Soleimani’s found portraits of the accused that she uses in her photographed sets). Out of the thousands of executions, little to none of this deadly injustice has been shared with international media.

After receiving her MFA in Photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Soleimani was awarded the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design Fellowship and is serving as an Assistant Professor of Graduate studies at Rhode Island School of Design.

Both sensual and grotesque, intimate and public, Sofia Szamosi photographic and video self-portraits are about “the bondage of the self, the challenges of surrender, the confines and margins of the body and the world around that body.” In relation to her long-term photobooth project:

My current work is a negotiation between the lived experience of gender and the performance of it—a documentation of my personal searching and my relationship with my outer world. It is intimate, public, and necessary. […]The photo booth becomes a microcosm for the boxes I experience daily […]This is a public art—photo booths sit in commercial spaces. There is an inherent performance and exhibition involved in the process, and this is one more boundary.

Szamosi is currently enrolled in NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study, has presented in Gallatin Galleries, as well as solo and group shows at Open Source Gallery, Proto Gallery, and with Superchief.

Dessi Terzieva utilizes virtual reality in collage, photo, video, and installation formats by manipulating traditional uses of craft and technology, and breaking down the real and imagined worlds into conceptual representation of human’s relationship to technology, science, and the social consciousness. Through her latest project the audience will experience the future findings of technology as discovered in an archeological dig, with “Big Brother” over their shoulder. After participating as a Red Bull House of Art resident, Terzieva has participated in exhibitions nationally and internationally from Detroit to Switzerland, as well as featured in international publications such as London-based DASH Magazine.

Doubly So

March 18- April 15

Opening March 18, 6-8P

Center Galleries at College for Creative Studies

201 E Kirby Street, Detroit MI

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