TRANSFER Gallery Attempts To Crack The Digital Art Dilemma

Digital art, and in particular Net Art, has long had a chip on its shoulder. There’s simply no market for this kind of immaterial, internet-based work. Like most media online—be it music, film, books, or pricey software packages—nobody wants to pay for it. Countless artists, curators, and galleries have experimented with the salability of digital work — some have been successful, others less so. But on the whole, the problem still persists, plaguing the community of artists making and sharing their work on the web.

Transfer, a new gallery that opened in East Williamsburg last weekend, aims to create a space for artists working online to experiment with making and selling physical work. In doing so, co-owners Kelani Nichole and Jereme Mongeon, are encouraging a young group of artists who primarily work online to re-connect with their roots in drawing, painting, sculpture or photography and giving them four blank walls within which they can literally “transfer” their artistic practice back into a physical context.

Their first show, “Truisms”, a solo show from new media artist Alexandra Gorczynski, sees a return to Gorczynski’s painterly past. Its main centerpiece is a mural of a Mac desktop background and stacked with “files” of her images. The prints themselves are collage-based works riddled with computer iconography and the painterly gesture of Photoshop. Also accompanying the show is a limited edition artist book that was sold ahead of the show’s opening to raise money for its production costs, getting the community to support the exhibition much like it would on crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter.

Gorczynski painting her Mac desktop mural at Transfer.

The finished mural.

The opportunity for this kind of experimentation may prove a crucial one—not only for the creative, aesthetic, and conceptual development of the artists involved, but also in terms of cracking the question of how best to support and sustain this creative practice. At the end of the day, the fact still holds that people are far more willing to pay for tangible objects than they are for jpeg files. The ability to package immaterial or ephemeral work into salable components is a crucial question for digital art to crack—we need only to look at performance art to see this notion reinforced.

It’s still early days for Transfer, but the gallery shows promise. We spoke with Kelani Nichole, the gallery’s co-founder and curator, about her vision and goals for the space.

The Creators Project: Why did you decide to start Transfer?
Kelani Nichole: Transfer was born out of a desire to continue a line of inquiry that developed over the course of my independent curatorial career in Philadelphia. Specifically: I began to investigate the ways in which certain bodies of ‘New Media’ work are crossing the boundaries of physical and digital space.

Having recently relocated to NYC, I didn’t yet have access to a local space to realize curatorial projects. My experience with little berlin in Philadelphia gave me a solid foundation for what it takes to maintain a space. So as I started to look around and found I could acquire maybe 600 or 700 square feet within a budget my partnership and day job can support, well, that was a pleasant surprise.

But the real driving factor to take the plunge and acquire some walls for a year was a desire to work more intimately with artists one-on-one, through a series of solo shows. I wanted to explore how access to an exhibition space without the constraints of a typical institutional model might help deepen and extend a body of work consisting primarily of computer-based practices.

A diptych from “Truisms.”

How did you arrive at your particular curatorial focus?
The focus of our exhibition calendar in this first year at Transfer is definitely an evolution of >get >put which was my most recent independent curatorial project. That show was the culmination of a year and a half of research, collaboration, and synthesis among a group of six artists.

My current focus is to invest in and engage with the community of artists working with rich computer-based practices—artists who are exploring the friction between digital practice and its physical instantiation—by developing solo and duo shows within our walls. Previous collaborators seemed a natural place to start with Transfer, specifically A Bill Miller and Alexandra Gorczynski, as I have watched their work evolve and have an established a close working relationship with them both.

On being a “so-called net.art gallery”: there are various labels loosely attached to this networked group of artists who exhibit actively online and participate in creative exchange on the Internet – Net.art, New Aesthetic, New Media, Glitch, etc. Transfer feels limited by any one of these labels but its clear that in the sum total of these practitioners lies some significant momentum.

One of Gorczynski’s ‘Wacom Tablet Paintings.’

What is it about taking art from the digital to the physical space that appeals to you? Is there an implicit challenge in that “transfer” that excites you?
Through the feedback I received from ‘>get >put’ it became apparent that space is one of the most essential needs that practicing artists are seeking—this has always been the case to be sure, but somehow the urgency to create a physical space for artists working with digital practices was too much to ignore. The inaccessibility of physical space is something that often drives a body of work further into digital space where audience and storage space is vast and negligible in cost.

The hope with Transfer is that when backed by a platform of support these artists can find a broader, “away from keyboard” audience, engage further with the more physical (or if you prefer, “traditional”) side of their practices, and expand and explore the relationship between their digital and physical work in new ways.

Why do you think it’s important for digital artists to have a space to experiment with making physical work?
Audience and encounter are some of the most essential experiences that help develop an artist’s body of work. With the vast connectivity and access of the internet, practices have adapted to be consumable within the browser, to be an integral part of the stream and feed of the network. These practices are often rooted in more traditional training, yet because of demand and access, artists invest in digital, distributed mediums as opposed to engaging physically with their painterly or drawing or sculptural or performative backgrounds. If you have eight shows online in a year and not a single one is in a physical gallery space, why would you invest in material work?

I’m of the opinion that a body of work transcends its physical manifestation. I’m interested in artists who want to explore what happens as they position their computer-based practices in a physical encounter with the audience—in a way that isn’t prescribed upon by the institution or the network. This physical engagement is what I think is essential in the idea of our exhibition space.

The limited edition artist book that Transfer sold to raise money for “Truisms.”

You’ve developed a unique monetary model with Transfer. Why do you think a mixture of community supported pre-sales and traditional gallery sales is proving an effective approach?
Its not proven yet! But the success of platforms such as Kickstarter to fund the arts is undeniable. Much of this is due to the scale of that platform’s audience, but when it comes down to it, people will support work they believe in if the price is affordable and the transaction is easy.

A few of the artists we’re working with have done personal fundraising for their work, and even dabbled with sales online. We want to help further and formalize those efforts in relationship to our space, and the hope my partner and I have is that with our professional skillset to back the platform we can find new footing for moving the funding model to the front of the transactional funnel—a more evolved patronage model if you will, where acquisition of smaller collection items enables larger exploration within the gallery walls. We hope it gives artists a means to deepen their practice, and new audiences a way to broaden (or start) their personal collections.

Are you willing to reveal how successful sales have been? Even in abstract terms?
So far, we’ve covered the production costs of our first show, and there’s enough coming in for the artist to get a place here in NYC. But aside from the financial gain for the artist, the opportunity to produce a solo exhibition and the new connections and exposure her practice is receiving are the most important measures of success in our eyes. This is work we believe in and want to see it grow and develop.

What’s been the most surprising thing about the reaction to this first show?
The opening night was surreal. I didn’t take a single picture because every time I looked around the room I was just overwhelmed with joy at the energy, enthusiasm, and support of the community of people invested in new media practice here in NYC. There were art stars, internet figures extraordinaire, writers, critics, people working in the arts as their second job (like us), old and young new media practitioners, collectors, co-workers, arts tech community members and collaborators… everyone seemed to have a mutual stake in furthering this conversation. The most surprising part of it all is that this thing I felt urgency to create is aligning to meet a real need that exists in the artworld right now.