* OPEN 5-8 PM DURING THE ART CRAWL ONLY*
The Browsing Room is very pleased to announce a two-person exhibition entitled Hollow Graphics: Megan Bickel and Adam Eddy
Exhibit Dates: January 4– February 20, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 4, 5-8 pm
Art Crawl Opening: Saturday, January 11, 6-9 pm
About the Exhibit:
Resting within the hallowed halls of The Met Cloisters is the Portal from the Church of San Leonardo al Frigido, a Byzantine door which marks the main entrance of a small church dedicated to Saint Leonard that is located on the Frigido River. The door was carved to show scenes of the Annunciation and the Visitation on the left and a large figure of Saint Leonard of Noblat, patron saint of prisoners, on the right. On the lintel above is the Jesus figure’s Entry into Jerusalem, a scene particularly appropriate for the location of the church, on a main road that pilgrims followed through Italy en route to the Holy Land. While the style of the scene recalls Early Christian tomb reliefs, the same subject was famously carved over the door of the church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in the Crusader era. The doorway was created in the workshop of Biduinus, a sculptor whose name is known from his signature on several monuments preserved in the Pisa-Lucca area. The imagery within the Portal was designed to call to mind a place of safety and transference into a better realm–one free of the hardships of imprisonment, and the exhaustion of travel by foot. One where safety wasn’t a lofty pursuit, but a guaranteed reality.
Thousands of years later, the English usage of ‘portal’ appears most commonly within science and speculative fiction. It often appears as a doorway, much like the Portal from the Church of San Leonardo al Frigido mentioned above, but functions as a gateway between two places–leaving one and entering another instantaneously through a suggested or alluded to teleportation. They are the proposed, and perhaps porous, spaces between reality and imagination–where we have the opportunity to rebuild our worlds–both internally and socially.
It’s at the crux of this permeable space where Megan Bickel and Adam Eddy use painting to investigate visual perception and speculative futures. They repurpose the long histories of landscape and still life as experimental spaces for imagining an expanded self in the digital era. A diverse range of influences from Dutch golden age painting to science fiction blur together to create new ways of seeing and building memory. Bickel makes objects, paintings, performs data analysis, and writes about subjects that oscillate between announcing and concealing meaning. The paintings cultivate mysterious and unserious fields of imagery that interrogate what it means to be visually critical now and in the future. Eddy uses traditional oil painting techniques in conjunction with digital tools to imagine non-human intelligence and interdimensional communication. Together their work explores the picture plane as a space for new realities, ways of seeing, and theories of mind.
Bickel and Eddy are both members of the Tiger Strikes Asteroid collective, which is active in cities such as Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Greenville, SC. Nashville curator Mauro Barreto has arranged this and February’s exhibit, which will feature another member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Joseph Smolin.
Adam Eddy is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher whose work ranges from painting and sculpture to computer graphics and immersive technology. He received an MFA in painting and drawing from Boston University in 2016 and an MFA in creative technologies from Virginia Tech in 2022. Before joining the faculty at UAB, Eddy was an assistant professor of studio art at Columbia College and an adjunct professor of painting and drawing at the College of Charleston. His work has been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions at national and international venues.
Eddy's work explores the porous boundaries between ourselves and others, organic and mechanical sentience, animals and humans, animacy and inanimacy, past and future, truth and magic, the dead and the living. By questioning the dichotomies constructed in our minds, Eddy seeks to explore the interconnectedness of things. His aim is to challenge individuality, exceptionalism, and the social hierarchies that isolate us.
Megan Bickel is an artist, digital humanist, writer, and educator currently working out of Louisville, Kentucky. Her work considers and utilizes various approaches and technologies such as painting, data manipulation, digital collage, database reconfiguration, and poetry. Bickel’s work has been exhibited at the Speed Art Museum (Louisville, KY), University of Chicago Logan Center (Chicago, IL), LADIES ROOM LA (Los Angeles, California), KMAC Museum (Louisville, KY), Georgetown College (Georgetown, KY), QUAPPI Projects (Louisville, KY), Art Academy of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, Oh), and MADS Mixed Reality Gallery (Milan, Italy), University of Kentucky (Lexington, KY) and Institute 193 (Lexington, KY).
She has been the founder and organizer of houseguest gallery since 2018, and has had fiction and arts criticism published nationally. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of Louisville’s Hite Institute of Art & Design. She recently received her Master of Arts in Digital Studies in Language, Culture, and History at the University of Chicago. Her thesis research assessed how Google Vision API and other related APIs would impact the fate of climate reporting due to current labeling production design. She is currently working on expanding this data set and expanding the research into a book with coauthor Joseph Solis.