“What’s on your mind?”

Is there anything NOT on your mind? With the ubiquitous proliferation of social and information networks in our lives, EVERYTHING seems to always be on our collective mind(s).

In her second solo exhibition at Pablo’s Birthday, Carla Gannis posts her personal “mind” reflections onto the gallery walls, and offers us, like the “drink me” bottle that jettisoned Alice into Wonderland, access into a world of nostalgic-futurist visions, pleasure-principled dystopias, and myth-based mash ups wrapped in blurred social metaphor.

In these digitally painted narratives, we find fragments, like so many tweets or Facebook “on my mind” commentaries, stirred into a cocktail of subconscious visual meanderings and hybridity. For instance, in Gannis’s centerpiece, The Park, references to art history and social networks collide, in an expansive panoramic triptych that exists pictorially somewhere between a traditional watercolor and a virtual role-playing fantasy game screen.

Welcome to the massively multiplayer world of Gannis’s imagination as seen through these preludes to online networked portals. Within the limitless worlds of design and interaction, what artistic possibilities exist and what rules apply? Where does virtual meet or become real? In these social communities what danger lies on the rocks where the binary Sirens sing? Are these even “communities” or rather viral masses of self-centric individuals, each a Narcissus drowning in his or her own reflection?