Eileen Isagon Skyers
Eyes Without a Face
May 3 – June 2, 2018

You will continue on forever. 

Your wires are a trick in the emulsion. 

You continue to speak, to repeat back to us

Even our worst dreams, we do not dream of your destruction. 
Even in
our worst
dreams.

We have a tendency to approach the verisimilitudes of computers and other non-human intelligences with a striking amount of unearned trust. Today’s AI mimics the dynamic relationships we engage in with other people, using elements of our input to both soothe and comfort us at all times. Plotting techniques for facial analysis render bright, minimal geometries over the face — a seemingly perfect recalculation of facial specificity. We have grown to rely on this, desperately — ensnared by the elaborately orchestrated mirror that always recognizes us, always tells us what we want to hear, and shows precisely what we want to see. In search of reflections, we glean together the distorted elements of a self. Taking its title from her recent essay by the same name, this exhibition evokes the beyond — or other-than-networked self — as something necessary and yet no longer fully known, or understood. 

Eileen Isagon Skyers (b. 1991) is an artist, writer, and curator. She has worked with contemporary art and non-profit arts organizations including The Whitney Museum, Rhizome, the New Museum, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Digital Museum of Digital Art (DiMoDA). Her moving image work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in the U.S., U.K., France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Mexico. Her first book, Vanishing Acts, was published by LINK Editions (Brescia, Italy) in 2015, and her writing has been published in Wreath, Glass Press of the Future, Web Safe 2k16, Printed Web, and New World UNLTD, among others. She is the creative director of HOUSING, an art space dedicated to artists of color, and she has performed at Downs & Ross (New York, NY), Littlefield (Brooklyn, NY), the Knockdown Center (Brooklyn, NY), Housing Works Books (New York, NY) and Shoot the Lobster (New York, NY). Skyers holds a BA in Philosophy and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of South Florida (Tampa, FL) and an MA in Critical Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art, (Portland, OR). She lives and works in New York, NY.

Photos by Mario Gallucci