For Immediate Release
A Sci-Fi High
Bill Albertini and Algernon Miller
Opening Reception:
Saturday, June 15, 5-7pm
Exhibition:
June 15 - July 21, 2024
MARQUEE PROJECTS is thrilled to present A Sci-Fi High, a two-person exhibition featuring sculptures by Bill Albertini and paintings by Algernon Miller. The exhibition is free and open to the public.
When we think of salient characteristics of the science fiction genre, we imagine fantastical, and/or futuristic speculations regarding science, technology, space exploration, parallel universes, extraterrestrial life, time travel, and altered states of consciousness. Bill Albertini and Algernon Miller offer visual corollaries to these fictive narrative tropes, with complementary bodies of work which celebrate a dynamic dialog of similarities and differences in concept, inspiration, and application.
In his multi-decade career, Bill Albertini has explored tensions between mechanics and nature, and examined the human impulse toward pareidolia (the tendency for perception to impose meaningful interpretations on ambiguous visuals and data) and the risks of that impulse and its inferences. Alluding to the sequential nature of the “exquisite corpse” technique championed by Surrealists (including André Breton, Jacques Prévert, and Yves Tanguy), Albertini’s “pipe dream system” uses 3D printing to create a diary of separately designed components which he later assembles into engineered, vaguely familiar objects redolent of faulty or unclear memory over the passage of time, or from dream states.
A father of Afrofuturist art, Algernon Miller has evolved, over a lifetime, a practice that attempts to synthesize past, present, and future – all while embracing cutting-edge technology to envisage alternative futures that transcend the alienation of race-based identity. The abstract paintings in this exhibit represent an ongoing direction and vision, an interest in energy, vibration and frequency. Layering patterns and codes above an expressively painted matrix (“ground zero”), he creates veiled portals that suggest inter-dimensionality, a place where the viewer can experience the familiar, and simultaneously contemplate a trip to another dimension – what Miller calls “multi-dimensional being-ness in a new unified visual field”.