Feral File is pleased to present FEMMEBIT’s In Medias Res, an exhibition of NFT artworks by feminist and post-cyberfeminist artists who reimagine celluloid-based media for the decentralized realm of "Life 3.0” or the” Age of Artificial Intelligence”. In Medias Res includes new works by Tuna Bora, Petra Cortright (thumbnail image: Still from Petra Cortright's “New Landscapes 2023”), Huntress Janos, Casey Kauffmann/ UncannySFValley, Wednesday Kim, Eve-Lauryn LaFountain, Anna Luisa Petrisko, Ellie Pritts, and JJ Stratford (image at the top: Still from "Television Figures" by JJ Stratford).

In Medias Res is an exhibition celebrating the contributions of feminist and post-cyberfeminist artists with ties to the vibrant city of Los Angeles. The artworks in this exhibition reflect today’s digital uprootedness from time-based narratives of the silver screen to invoke liminal spaces of belonging. They challenge conventional definitions of cities and identities in relation to mainstream media, geography, and land ownership.

The exhibition takes its name from the narrative device “in medias res,” a Latin term defined as “into the midst of things.” As this might suggest, the nine artists in the exhibition invite us to engage directly with the heart of their stories, wherein they explore their personal relationships to Los Angeles as they negotiate daily life in relation to Hollywood and the broader SoCal area.

The title is also a comment on the nature of NFTs themselves — media without a beginning, middle, or end. As still or looping moving images, NFTs have a strange relationship to time, often depicting states of emergence as powerful vignettes. In this sense, NFTs might be considered “in the midst of things,” post-time and post-narrative, especially in contrast to the conventions of Hollywood storytelling.

We invite viewers on the journeys of our artists as they question and reinterpret visual mainstays of the Los Angeles landscape: for instance, Petra Cortright’s net-art practice often features landscapes of SoCal with layered meanings unique to digital methodologies. Tuna Bora, artist of the first Academy Award-nominated VR experience, Pearl, works at the intersection of conceptual practice, illustration, and narrative to create emotionally investigative digital worlds. Artists Anna Luisa Petrisko, JJ Stratford, and Ellie Pritts utilize analog video in their explorations of place and identity. For Anna Luisa, her work takes place in the California poppy fields, riffing on SoCal colors to instigate alternative spaces of belonging.

Ellie’s work combines a mix of AI and analog video to culminate in a meditation-qua-colorscape of Joshua Tree’s Martian-like desert-scapes. JJ Stratford’s work provides a glimpse into both ironic and iconic Hollywood glamour. Wednesday Kim and Huntress Janos utilize 3D model collage as a method of exploring heritage and queer identities, respectively, to complexly integrate bodies into the semiotics of external systems in urban environments. By decentering the ontological restraints of the body as a single corporeal form, Janos’s work reinvigorates identity for progressively liberated digital futures—wherein the body is a freed entity, reintegrated, and interconnected with the surrounding world.

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Eve-Lauryn LaFountain’s filmic sensibilities provide cinematic meditations on Los Angeles neighborhoods and speak to a sense of place from her multicultural indigenous heritage. Casey Kauffmann’s collage of Hollywood freeways showcases her humorously guttural sleuthing of reality television and consumer culture.

This exhibition had its own beginning in the midst of a larger project, FEMMEBIT, which began in 2016 as a festival for LA artists that first took place at Human Resources LA in Chinatown. Since then, core membership has varied, but our goals have remained the same: to offer a platform to showcase female and non-binary artists’ distinctive voices and perspectives.

The artists of In Media Res have collectively chosen to create 33 pieces of art. As an “angel number” in numerology (the study of the occult significance of numbers), “33” is often associated with artistic expression and creativity. Angel number 33 is also linked to collaboration and the importance of community. As the City of Angels, LA comprises thriving artistic scenes fed by the TV and film industry, video game industry, the art world, and the cult of celebrity. This is reflected in the wide range of mediums, tools, and narrative expressions in the show, including analog video, film, animation, AI, game engines, and XR. And despite the competitive nature of these various creative industries in the area, LA is home to an extraordinary collaborative spirit, without which FEMMEBIT would not exist.

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About

Feral File commissions curated exhibitions of digital artwork and partners with artists and institutions to explore new ways of exhibiting and collecting. Evolving from the art gallery and digital publishing models, Feral File borrows the best traits of each to inform a new kind of art space. Feral File works in tandem with a community of technologists, new media artists, collectors, and curators to redefine and frame a sustainable model for the future of digital experimentation.

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