Occupying a cold and windy graveyard shift at a commercial print facility - cyan, magenta and yellow inks began to leak from the printer. Whilst processing a six by twelve foot long fine art print, a head-strike, due to a malfunctioned ink nozzle, causes a spatter. The reproduction of a romanticized landscape from the famous Hudson River School of Painting, The Oxbox (1835-1836) by Thomas Cole, bled an industrial manufactured reality. Five hours of printing ultimately leading to failure was just another day and another attempt at virtual tangibility. But as I was pulling the image off the print-bed, it began to bound in a cylindrical totem of the panoramic landscape it once was, leaving just enough space to enter through it’s un-seamed fracture. Towering over me, I slid my body into the material - I had entered the Image-Sphere. Depicting space juxtaposed with surface sapts of color, it was both an image and a dwelling. Whilst toxic inks filled my lungs, I knew the isolation of the Image-Sphere was where I would spend the rest of my night.

Prior to Covid-19, upon my last few days of occupation at a commercial print facility, I began this project by filming the length of the production floor with a 360º camera. As artists began to submit work through Off Site Project’s invitation, I began both building and sourcing 360º images from Google Maps and gaming engines, part of an ongoing conversation about directing a group show with third and fourth dimensional space. Some works became environments for performance to take place in, or on for that matter. For instance, Jessica Evans’s performance between Micheal and Shelly (two AI avatars) happens upon Ian Bruner’s Amazon sculpture. Elsewhere juxtaposed encounters take place, Bob Bicknell-Knight’s battlefield scene meets Joshua Citarella’s boots, extracted from his Iconic S.W.I.M. triptych (2017). Later the viewer will inhabit Citarella’s work depicted as a cylindrical can-shaped studio - notability one of the artist’s only photograph works that can function like a map projection.

Much of my process here has meant working between equirectangular and spherical images, sometimes purposely warping, bending, and skewing an image like a rubber band. Outside of The Terminal (2021), I may be understood as a digital cartographer, burrowing through public-private space in a performance of feverish activity. Thinking of Google Street View as a form of cinema, Kakia Konstantinaki’s biomorphic 3D object was placed into a sequence of two-hundred-and-ninety-one 360º images from Facebook’s ‘Hacker Way,’ all tediously appropriated through multiple screenshots, paralleling the endless feed of social media platforms.

Some of the more complex scenes feature images, videos, and 3D objects colliding in custom built environments, many of which were photographed within the print facility itself. The piece as a whole is an exquisite corpse of sorts - a conversation between contemporary artists working across continents, unaware of how [or whether] a narrative would develop. Embodying a directorial and composisorial role, my curiosity wondered: what story this piece could tell, and what way I could connect the lines between works to make that story come to life.

Of course, it’s a real luxury to work with so many talented people and have them put their trust in you. Towards the circular-end of the work, the viewer moves through the print facility in reverse, except, this time it’s completely empty. The space has since closed, and as one can imagine, livelihoods were disrupted. The Terminal may be understood as a space one moves through, however, it may also be a space in the mind of the laborer, daydreaming, while occupying a print facility, or in the process of displacement

Jason Isolini is a Brooklyn based artist, whose techniques of 360° collage and network interventions test the increased conflation of corporate, public and private environments. He is currently an MFA candidate for the Art Institute of Chicago's Low Residency program. His work has been exhibited in exhibitions including: The FiDi Arsenale, Hot Air & Mery Gates, New York City; Well Now WTF, Silicon Valet, online (2020); TechnoMEME 2, Fuse Factory, Ohio; Perma Falling, 77 Mulberry, New York City (2019); Terms and Conditions Apply, Annka Kultys Gallery, London; and Permeable Boundaries, Plexus Projects, New York City (2018). Intervening within Google Maps, he has created large-scale public art installations that comment upon our new digital commons.

The Terminal: Human Shaped Whole

directed by: Jason Isolini

featuring: Bob Bicknell-Knight, Ian Bruner, Joshua Citarella, Jessica Evans, James Irwin, Claire Jervert, Kakia Konstantinaki, Angeline Meitzler, Erin Mitchell and Neale Willis

curated by: Off Site Project

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:  

Jason Isolini .