Winkleman Gallery is very pleased to present transubstrational: as a smartmatter of nanofacture, our second solo exhibition by New York artist Shane Hope. Expanding on his explorations of emerging molecular nanotechnologies which could give rise to near costless systems for controlling the structure of matter itself, Hope takes us one step further with two series of incredible work made from the very cutting-edge open-source tools that are increasingly being developed for such research.

For his new series of lenticular-3D prints (titled “post-scarcity_percept-pus”), Hope has continued to customize user-sponsored open-source nanomolecular design software systems. He uses this software to modify, manipulate and design groups of molecular models. To build his painterly pictures, he assembles together tens of thousands of these models, resulting in fantastic compositions depicting organic, inorganic, synthesizable, theoretically feasible and nano-nonsensical molecules. The lenticular 3D print format presents holographic-like relief-sculptural depth, providing an extraordinary view into molecular design spaces and how hacking matter happens.

For his second series (“qubit-built-quilted_scriptable-species-being_on_graphene”), Hope built by hand open-source / open-hardware 3D printers (RepRaps) with the intent to literally convert bits back into atoms. In RepRap tradition, he used his first ‘parent’ 3D printer to print in PLA (polylactic acid) parts for subsequent ‘child’ printers; essentially printing printers. Named “Foglet-Fabber-Fidel, Percept-Pus-Pandora, Qubit-Quaker-Quinn and Borganic-Blobjecthoodlum-Beulah,” this family-printer-farm has also been used to materialize his huge cache of modded molecular models. Hope here exhibits an array of 3D-prints particularly representative of graphene, the nobel-prize worthy carbon structure that after silicon will likely be that upon which we compute next.

Shane Hope received his MFA from the University of California San Diego in 2002 and has attended the University of California Los Angeles, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has exhibited at Virgil de Voldere Gallery in New York; Project Gentili, in Prato, Italy; iMAL (interactive Media Art Laboratory) in Brussels, Belgium, Rosamund Felson Gallery in Los Angeles and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.