Heft@heft_gallery
The Whitney acquires artworks from two series presented by Heft:
Facetune Portraits, by Gretchen Andrew
@gretchenandrew
Taking Stock, by Michael Mandiberg
@mandiberg
These acquisitions are the sole works to enter the permanent collection of the Whitney’s Digital Art department in this half of the year. A deep thanks to the Whitney Digital Art team, Acquisition Committee, and the Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney, Christiane Paul @ChristianePaul2
It's been an honor to show these special bodies of work over the past year in major fair presentations at @untitledfairs and @ParisPhotoFair as well as at our NYC gallery.
The two series interrogate the trend towards homogenizing the way people are portrayed in an era of global digital media consumption, each engaging issues around artificial intelligence.
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For Taking Stock, Michael Mandiberg collected and analyzed 130 million stock photographs to produce a series of photographs and videos that surface the ideologies haunting these ubiquitous images.
image: Topic 23, Pose 21, Gesture 68 (depressed, stressed, problem, etc.) + Topic 11, Pose 7, Gesture 57 (business, corporate, executive, etc.)
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In Gretchen Andrew’s Facetune Portraits, custom robotics scribe the popular AI-driven beauty filters of social media into oil paintings derived from images of quintessential beauty.. Normally, on TikTok and via Zoom’s “touch up” feature, these visual modifications occur seamlessly and invisibly. By making this process visible, Facetune Portraits reveals the messy co-existence we have with our digital selves.
image: Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty, Puerto Rico + USA