Artist Rhonda Holberton and Curator Tanya Zimbardo In Conversation
Wednesday June 7th, 6-8pm
Join us for a conversation with artist Rhonda Holberton and SFMOMA new media curator Tanya Zimbardo. Holberton and Zimbardo will discuss the artist's new solo exhibition Two Handfuls of Silver Dust currently on view at CULT Aimee Friberg in San Francisco.
Holberton's new work includes a series of paintings, sculptures and animations made in collaboration with a group of artificial intelligence [AI] models and continues her study of the relationship between humanity and technology using the bots as partners. The resulting work subverts our expectations (or questions the parameters) of authorship and exposes the slippage between human and cyborg.
The works in Two Handfuls of Silver Dust are a reflection of Holberton’s own language and the process of iteration between human and machine. Like a game of telephone or exquisite corpse, Holberton and the bots blur the lines between a human’s rendering of a concept and the machine’s. Today, the public outcry over bots like Chat GPT looms large in both the world of the individual creator and those fixated on privacy. Cognizant of the nuanced complications from using these technologies, and interested in the ethical concerns that will arise, as well as the benefits, Holberton engages our fears and our idealistic fantasies of the future relationship between humans and artificial intelligence.
Rhonda Holberton (b. 1981 Falls Church, VA USA) utilizes technology as a medium to reconcile the biological body with geologic time, revealing their material and environmental impacts both on individual entities and on a planetary scale. Her subtle animations, digital interventions, sculptures and installation pieces move between the material and the immaterial, the authentic and synthetic, and pay special attention to the phenomenology of climate change in order to imagine ways we might collectively write more inclusive rules for digital platforms. Holberton has exhibited widely, including at CULT Aimee Friberg (San Francisco), RMIT Gallery (Melbourne); La Becque Résidences d’artistes (La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland); FIFI Projects (Mexico City); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco); The Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco); San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (San José); and the San Francisco Arts Commission (San Francisco). She was awarded the Fondation Ténot Fellowship in Paris and the CAMAC Artist in Residence at Marnay-sur-Seine, France. Holberton’s work is included in the permanent collections of SFMOMA and the McEvoy Foundation, as well as various private collections. She holds a MFA from Stanford University and is currently Assistant Professor of Digital Media at San José State University.
Tanya Zimbardo is a San Francisco-based curator. As an assistant curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Zimbardo has curated solo exhibitions of work by Jim Campbell, Runa Islam, Pat O'Neill, Nam June Paik (with Rachel Jans), and Kerry Tribe, as well as the two-person and group surveys including Speculative Portraits (featured Rhonda Holberton), Future Histories: Theater Gates and Cauleen Smith, Nothing Stable under Heaven, and Soundtracks. Her SFMOMA exhibitions Ragnar Kjartansson: The Visitors and Susan Philipsz: Songs Sung in the First Person on Themes of Longing, Sympathy and Release are currently on view. Over the past decade, Zimbardo has guest (co-)curated exhibitions, screenings, and public programs for the Berkeley Art Center, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Mills College Art Museum, San Francisco Cinematheque, The 500 Capp Street Foundation, among others.
