Selling Out, the visual art debut of Grimes, is an experiential exhibition, presented by Maccarone, Los Angeles, featuring original drawings, prints derived from digital artworks, and an immersive installation.
Grimes is a project rooted in DIY production -- an interdisciplinary endeavor derived from the self-taught artistry of its author, Claire Boucher. Boucher’s creation is titled Grimes, a persona and the imagined realm that she inhabits, spanning art, music, fashion, technology and film. The origin of Grimes recalls a sculptor’s process: actualizing a cerebral concept into physical reality, imagining raw material into being. Grimes takes form as a simulation combining gamer fantasy, anime and manga, science fiction, apocalyptic omens, and anachronistic fashion, among other genres.
Boucher drew her own world, filling copious, diaristic notebooks with mythic and psychedelic imagery, borrowing from Art Nouveau, Aztec, and surrealist iconographies. She approached songwriting and music production with the same method -- a self-contained practice in the studio: looping, layering, and sampling sounds into her own audio landscape. Grimes is the result of innate audiovisual experimentation.
Selling Out explores the notion of identity potential in the digital age: the ability to create, augment, and manifest ourselves outside of our biological limits. Grimes does so with WarNymph , a digital avatar executed in collaboration with her brother and artistic partner, Mac Boucher. WarNymph is birthed out of AI and stands in as a concurrent self for the virtual realm, reconciling the psychological dissonance of splitting oneself between digital ideation and mundane reality. An avatar takes on the burden, untethering its biological counterpart from the online world. WarNymph transcends mere replica; presenting a new non-human entity, an “Otherkin.” The exhibition features WarNymph in a series of digital photographs, capturing the avatar at different points in her life cycle, as both an infant and a young woman. WarNymph is portrayed as a winged warrior and a goddess-like figure, presiding over a dystopic, futuristic universe. Ruins specifically appropriates historic Baroque sensibility in its incorporation of the ancient.
The Life and Death of WarNymph is a meditation series, achieved by feeding meditation literature, video game scripts and social media accounts to AI. WarNymph vocalizes the resulting text through deep fake technology. The meditations are a re-aestheticization of the health and relaxation genre, whereby artifice becomes a means to wellbeing.
Soul for Sale, a conceptual artwork, expands upon the conceit of partitioning and re-administering one’s identity executed as a contract in which Grimes sells a piece of her soul as a unique digital asset. The purchaser will receive a certified virtual representation of the artist’s soul which will be updated as it morphs over time. Soul for Sale satirizes expectations of authenticity, as if there is an innate, genuine self that one must preserve, or else admit to selling out.
Grimes further dissects notions of artistic integrity in her juxtaposition of hand drawn works alongside digitally-rendered editioned prints. Selling Out challenges the idea of tactically-made art as superior to the virtually-made -- as if an artist can distill their identity through pen and paper, but a computer belies their true self. This idea is founded in the potential for perfection in the digital realm. Mistakes connote authenticity, and without them, we are accused of contrition. Grimes challenges this expectation, exhibiting her finished, perfected album covers in addition to the unused options. The failed attempts are revealed from privacy, exposing creative vulnerability in a self-deprecative act of selling oneself out.