A new generation of young creators has emerged that operates not from a deep contemplation of Duchamp, Beuys, Foucault, or Baudrillard, but from Dungeons and Dragons figurines, ‘80s “mythic” heavy-metal album covers, cyberpunk paperback art, and the kind of paintings of Vikings and missile-breasted Amazons found on the side of VW vans. Niche.LA and Lounge 441’s “Digital World: Oz” features the gently dissolving images of the flabbergasting Charli Siebert, described in the press materials as a self-taught “23-year-old digital artist from Huntington Beach, CA.” Siebert’s independence from art-school cant is gratifying in itself, but her frosted, distressed, tactile-but-ethereal images are the real thing—Goth and sci-fi kitsch ossified into beaux-arts stateliness. Her porny, morbid figures hover in a state of being pitched somewhere between photorealism and PhotoShop artifice, as if a family of Joel-Peter Witkin ghouls had invented their own video game to live in.
more about the show at Niche.La and Lounge 441 here.