The present is how I, or whoever visits the Dumbo Arts Center, interprets Nivi Alroy and Shirley Shor's first collaborative mixed-media installation, Pixelville. With the start of 2010, Dumbo Arts Center premiered Pixelville, an exhibition that incorporates urban planning and thoughtful analysis environments from the past while simultaneously acknowledging the rapid transformation of cities in the present and future. The capabilities of technology never ceases to amaze me, especially in my attempt to keep up with the many technological advancements that occur, but a question that continues to plague my mind is, how can we capture-or remain in the moment? A series of cliches quotes come to mind, "live in the moment," "live each day as if it your last"...blah blah. Well, how can I do that?!
The world is becoming so modern these last decades that I don't even know where it will go . I personally think we are always absorbing information from all the technological media that we are surrounded by, so much so that we often forget to create and be creative. Instead of expressing creatively the knowlege we've been collecting in our lifetime, we simply keep collecting it for the future. For example, we choose to take pictures of great landscapes to store forever rather than taking a moment to sit and feel the present sensation of being somewhere nice and beautiful.
This is what comes to mind when I observe this exhibition. It is the merger between virtual and real life, that makes you forget where you are, who you are and what you feel.
Peter Frank, the curator of Pixelville, acknowledged the fluctuation of time when he stated, "we have access to the past as never before, and the future- for better or worse- seems to be similarly immediate. Does the present, then, still exist? Is there a place where the actual moment maintains?"
Live in the moment, and come visit Pixelville to expose yourself, in the moment, to ideas of the past, present and future.
Top notch exhibitions showcase art work that tells a story beyond what your eyes can see. This is the case with DAC's current photography exhibition, "Battlefields" by Nebojsa Seric-Shoba. What look like standard landscape photographs are actually the backdrops for mass blood shed through out the ages. Locations range from Troy, Gernika and San Antonio (the site of the Alamo).
