The Hogar Collection is very pleased to announce Incidents and Accidents a group exhibition curated by Gerelyn Blackstone Bridges, featuring photography, video, performance and new media work by Katherine Behar, Ira Eduardovna, Jeff DeGolier and Siebren Versteeg.

Incidents and Accidents explores the diversity of new media artwork and its inherent incidental and accidental properties. The exhibition presents the potential of new media as a self creating medium with the artist acting as a catalyst. This multifarious group of artists exploit these parameters to different degrees with differing consequences. We invite you to consider the definition of new media and its position as both an autonomous practice and as an adjunct to a more established medium.

Katherine Behar‘s combination of installation, performance and video mix low and high technologies to portray the condition of living sensuously in digital media. Behar asks her viewer to consider what it means to share their world with advanced technologies by exploring human-machine companionship. Her performance Hexxed attempts to meet her silicon siblings halfway, promoting camaraderie with the physical armatures that uphold bits and bytes.

Katherine Behar lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Akin to the ambitions of new media technology, Ira Eduardovna‘s work navigates the constant search for a new ideal place. Eduardovna comtemplates the cultural changes that occur when one faces a change in their habitat, whether that be societal or environmental. The featured work Library room is a sculptural video installation that re-creates a scene of the artists’s family packing to move to a new country. This projects an optimistic promise for a brighter future, though more succinctly bestows nostalgia for an imperfect past.

Ira Eduardovna lives in Brooklyn and is currently pursuing her MFA at Hunter College, NY.

Jeff DeGolier likens his creative process to that of making a painting yet uses almost every other medium to arrive at his finished piece. His digitally manipulated photographs evolve from outlandish sets made of discarded objects. DeGolier elevates this former trash with such curious elegance it questions notions of beauty and value. His fastidious photographic technique and digital manipulation results in bemusingly fantastical yet familiar photographs.

Jeff DeGolier lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Siebren Versteeg’s Heaven and Hell is perhaps the most paradigmatic example of the incidental and accidental nature of new media. This internet connected program, designed by Versteeg, collects and divides random Google images titled either Heaven or Hell and displays them on a framed LCD monitor. By the nature of its construction it is constantly evolving, automatically rearticulatling the terms of its title and creating new versions of itself.

Siebren Versteeg lives and works in Brooklyn.